


True Steel

by afewreelthoughts



Series: True Steel [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Renly Lives, Angst, Diplomacy, M/M, The Night's Watch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2018-10-30 18:12:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10882248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afewreelthoughts/pseuds/afewreelthoughts
Summary: When Renly Baratheon loses the Battle of Storm's End, his brother Stannis sends him to the take the black as punishment for his treason.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My feelings about Renly Baratheon change from day to day, sometimes it seems, with the weather. At times I find myself agreeing with those who call him cruel and selfish, at times I think he’s the best leader Westeros could have ever hoped for, at times that he probably loved more deeply and cared more about the good of the country than any other. (And at yet other times, I think George threw in conflicting views of this character coupled with precious little time with him just to fuck with us.)
> 
> I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own anything or make any money from any of it. Everything belongs to George R.R. Martin.
> 
> Find my [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/ul87r9jbadtazxdqfu9zn1lcm/playlist/40091IVkVYMtiO8xLxctz3) for this story on spotify.
> 
> (Edited for style and syntax 25/5/2017)

_"...and Renly, that one, he's copper, bright and shiny, pretty to look at but not worth all that much at the end of the day"_

***

The sun was setting, bright and cold, when the fallen king arrived at Castle Black. The Wall glittered like diamonds, bright enough to blind, and it shone on the dirt and grime covering the king’s once fine clothes. He was accompanied by scores of men, all with the sigil of a stag surrounded in flames on their chests. One of the men pulled on the rope attached to the king’s hands, and came to a halt in front of Bowen Marsh. “King Stannis Baratheon of the Seven Kingdoms, the First of His Name, Azor Ahai Come Again, has instructed us to deliver this recruit for the Night’s Watch.”

Satin watched the scene unfold from his window in Castle Black, the black brothers in the yard gathering together, curious and wary.

“A single recruit?” Bowen Marsh said, always counting. “Out of the seventy-six of you?”

“A single recruit. My companions and I will stay here only until Renly Baratheon takes the black.”

When the king’s name was spoken, the whispers in the yard grew tenfold, as if they had not known. Satin had recognized the sigil on the king’s doublet, the golden stag on green, beading and golden thread visible through the dirt of the road. He had heard so much about King Renly on his journey north from the Reach that he felt he was an old friend.

“Send Stannis Baratheon our thanks,” Bowen Marsh grumbled. “What does he want from us?”

" _King_ Stannis simply wants to ensure that his brother takes the black, as punishment for his treason.”

“How am I to know that this man is who you say he is?” Bowen Marsh crossed his arms.

The prisoner’s voice rang clear as a bell. “What reason would they have to lie?” King Renly's face was lost in a cloud of tangled black hair and beard. Satin was too far away to see the look in his eyes.

Satin could sense Bowen Marsh’s agitation even from this distance. The Night’s Watch took no part in the wars of Westeros, and accepting this recruit might seem like he was showing favor to King Stannis. Or would bringing King Renly into the Night’s Watch be seen as treason by the king on the Iron Throne? In either case, a man so well known and so clearly unwilling might be more a liability than a recruit.

Bowen Marsh motioned to two recruits standing near him. “Please show these men to an empty room. Stannis Baratheon’s men will watch over their recruit until he takes the black.”

“ _King_ Stannis,” said the man who had spoken earlier.

“The Night’s Watch takes no part in this war, as in any other,” Bowen Marsh said loudly, a clear proclamation heard across the yard. “But any man willing to take the black is welcome here.”

“If I may,” King Renly said. Bowen Marsh froze. “Could I have water and a razor? It’s been a long journey.”

The black brothers quieted to hear the king speak, and the silence when he was led away was absolute. When the king and his guards entered Castle Black, the yard exploded with noise.

*

Renly feels eyes on his window and hears voices below, single words drifting up to him through the noise.

“…lost…”

“…Tyrells…" 

“…then where’s his crown?” 

He shaves his beard with the razor they give him and briefly considers hacking at his tangled hair. He wants nothing more than a decent bath, and the clean cloth and bowl of cold, soapy water he was given might be the closest thing at the Wall. He lifts his hand to shut the curtain, a visceral response he’s gained from life in King’s Landing, only to find that there is none. He knows the men in the yard below are looking up at him, but he finds that he does not care. Let them look.  

As he removes his ruined clothes and lays them out neatly, his mind grasps onto the choices still left to him.    

After his coronation at Highgarden, Renly had ordered as many messages as possible, in as many forms as possible, be sent to all corners of the realm, announcing his crown and queen. These men at the Wall might still see him as a king, even if he was never their king, and if there are more men at Castle Black than the ones he has seen, they stand a chance of overwhelming Stannis’s guards.

The dirt sloughs off of him beneath the cloth, revealing skin spangled with cuts and bruises. He scrubs until he turns pink.

He thinks of nothing but finding a way to leave the Wall. He does not think of what he will do after. He does not think of his crown at the bottom of the river. He will figure out what to do later. He always does.

Two of Stannis’s men have followed him down the stairs, and a third joins them, a few steps behind. "My personal guard," Renly muses.  "What would I do without you?"

He is shoved forward.

The wind blows through him when he opens the door to cross the training yard. The clothes that were so warm at Storm’s End feel like silken tissue at the Wall. The cold bites his chin and cheeks, newly bared to the northern wind, and his skin rises in goosebumps where he has barely dried it. 

Hunger is a scream in his belly, fear running up his spine by the time they step into the cold night. Since he was a boy, it has caused childish terror in him, but since the siege ended, he never truly went hungry, until the past few days. Food was scarce on their ride north, and Stannis’s guards could spare him nothing at all on the last day of their travels. They said it was Renly’s own fault, having trampled a round of cheese in an attempt to escape. The stew and rough bread served in the common hall are plain, but they taste like a Highgarden feast.

Only when he is done eating does he notice the quiet of the room. A storm cloud of men in motley black surrounds his table.

“My lord?” one of the men asks. “We would like to know what happened. To bring you here.”           

The wonder in their eyes warms him more than the food ever could, and he smiles and meets the eyes of as many men as he can. It is not a large crowd, and seeing the wall so sparsely populated makes him ill at ease. He cannot say why.

“What have you last heard of the war?” he asks.

“The Lannisters and the Starks are fighting, King Joffrey sits the Iron Throne, Balon Greyjoy began another rebellion in the Iron Islands, and you had the largest army in Westeros,” says a slim youth with dark hair.  Like many gathered round, he is not dressed in the black uniform of the Night's Watch.  Recent recruits, Renly guesses.

“Are there still five kings?” a black brother asks.

“As far as I know,” Renly says. He looks at Stannis’s men. “Four now, of course. Stannis attacked my camp under cover of dark, setting everything ablaze. The irony is, I was told to do the same. My bannermen insisted. I wanted to fight with honor.”

It had nothing to do with honor. He had wanted to beat Stannis honestly, so that when his brother yielded, he could not complain that Renly had an unfair advantage and would know he was falling to the better man.

“He offered me the opportunity to take the black, in exchange for my life,” Renly said.

“That was merciful,” someone murmured.

 

_“Put on your finest clothes, and set out by dawn,” Stannis says._

_“I have no black clothes,” Renly tells him, from where he kneels on the cool ground. “They will not allow me to keep any others.”_

_Stannis might have smiled, or perhaps it is a trick of the light, flickering shadows on his face pulling at the shape of his lips. “You have lived a vain, empty life, brother. I am giving you a chance to change,” Stannis says. “To prove there is still good left in you.”_

 

The words cut into him even in memory. Making Renly watch as his fine things are destroyed is an unnecessary cruelty, but after renouncing his dream of ruling Westeros and leaving behind everyone he has ever loved, what hurts most is that Stannis thinks he cares about his clothes.

He runs his fingers over the unraveling edge of his sleeve. 

“I don’t understand. Did you not have the largest army in Westeros, Your Grace? Can’t they come for you?” 

“My bannermen changed sides.”

All except the Tyrells. By the time Renly was tied to his horse, decked in his warmest finery, the Tyrells had fled, and Brienne and Loras had been taken captive. As he rode away, Renly looked back at the army he had brought with him to Storm’s End, arrayed behind Stannis and his glittering sword.

“Who is that, King Robert?” says a voice from the back of the crowd.

“No, he’s not. King Robert is dead,” says another.

“They’ll rescue you, I’m sure,” a young boy says. “They can’t have abandoned you.”

Every day on the march north, Renly told himself would be the day the Tyrells would rescue him. They never did. 

He forces himself to smile. “Do you know what the worst part of it is?”

The black brothers lean forward almost imperceptibly.

“The people of Westeros think I have abandoned them. When what I wanted was to save them.”

“Are you still a king?” a tall boy asks.

Renly can feel Stannis’s guards stiffening, turning to face them. But they cannot kill him, not here, not now.

Renly meets the boy's eyes. He is large, tow-headed, and has a serious face. “What do you think makes a king?”

No one answers. He did not expect them to.

“Is it the right crown? The largest army? Being named heir to the throne? The choice of the people? There is no one man in Westeros who fits every definition. Joffrey, Tommen, and Stannis all hold a better claim of blood than I do, but so did King Aerys before them. Was he a rightful king? I claimed the crown because I thought I could be a good ruler, better than the Lannisters, better than Stannis, and better than my brother before me. The realm agreed with me.”

If he had the eyes and ears of his audience before, he has their hearts now.

“I had the love of the people. I gave them hope. Should that not be enough?”

Stannis’s guards are standing behind him, their shadows towering over him.

“It’s time to go,” one says. 

Renly smiles at them. “What? Worried that I’m fomenting treason?” The other grabs him under the arm and pulls him to his feet. “I suppose we’re going.” The crowd parts for them.

“Before you go,” the commander calls out from the high table.  

The guards turn.

The commander's face is red and round, and reminds Renly of somewhat of a pomegranate.  “I will not have you inciting any trouble here, Baratheon. The Night’s Watch takes no part in any war. Whether or not you call yourself a king, you are as of today a recruit in the Night’s Watch. No better than any man here." 

“I never said I was.”

“I cannot allow you to say the sorts of things that you have said tonight. For the good of the Night’s Watch.” 

“You’ll stop me from speaking?”

Had a crumb of bread fallen in the hall, it would have been thunderous. 

“I’d like to see you try.”  The words are out before Renly can stop them.

 **

In the morning, he regrets them. He is paired with another new recruit his own height, but with hands the size of hams. Renly has always thought he was a passable knight, but under the force and precision of his opponent’s strikes, he is helpless. The strikes he does not parry always seem to land on his bruises, and his muscles scream from the fight at Storm’s End and the ride north. The other recruit apologizes when he knocks Renly down the first time, a look of sheer terror on his face, as though Renly has the ability to strike him dead with a word.

“I'm not fragile," Renly says, climbing to his feet. “Don’t hold back.”

He finds himself thrown onto his back again and again, until the falls jar his bones and mud soaks into his small clothes. 

The other recruits begin to mutter under their breath. Renly tunes out their words until drills are finally over, and the master at arms helps him to his feet.

“I was trained by the best,” Renly says and smiles, remembering Cortnay Penrose, besieged by his brother at Storm’s End. “I’m just not very good.”

“It’s your first day,” the master at arms says. “And I’m sure you’re tired, my lord.”  

Renly nods, grateful the man makes no more of it.

“I will fetch you something else to wear.”

Renly’s clothes, soiled with travel even when he arrived, now drip mud.

“No thank you,” Renly says.

He wrings the mud out of his doublet and trousers himself, dangling them out the window of his room. They are still dirty and stiff with cold when hunger drives him to breakfast.

All eyes in the room move towards him when he enters the common hall, but the wonder in them has faded somewhat.

The black brothers and new recruits all cluster together close to the fire. Renly walks towards the emptiest table. He can only half smile since his split lip opened again that morning. “May I sit here?” 

A slim, pretty young man with soft curls is sitting nearest to the end. His eyes are wide, like the rest of the room’s. “Of course.”

Conversation resumes when Renly sits.

The pretty young man clears his throat. “I’m Satin Flowers,” he says. 

“From the Reach? Where?”

“Oldtown.”

“When I was young, my brother suggested I go to Oldtown to be a maester," Renly says. "I thought he was joking. Now I think it's what he might have wanted for himself, had he the choice.” 

“Your brother…?” 

“My brother Stannis."

“The one who wants to be king?”

Renly snorts. “We’ll see about that.”

“You think the Lannisters will win?”

“Anything could happen."

Renly could return in triumph. Robb Stark could sweep south and kill them all. Stannis, Cersei, Mace Tyrell… Hatred settles in his stomach along with the porridge.

When he looks up, he notices the man next to Satin is staring at him intently. Everyone is staring, but this man seems to be studying his face like he could learn something from it. 

Renly looks towards Satin, not wanting to be rude, but unsure of what to say.

“That’s Deaf Dick Follard,” Satin says. “He can’t hear, but he reads lips.”

“Too bad. Mine are an ugly sight right now.”

Deaf Dick nods.

Renly wonders how badly the Night’s Watch has it if new recruits, the crippled, and the deaf are the only ones left behind to guard Castle Black. His heart sinks. 

“Is this all the men the Night’s Watch has?” Renly asks.

Satin shakes his head. “We’re only the men at Castle Black. There are more at Eastwatch and the Shadow Tower. Castle Black also sent their best rangers beyond the wall.” Satin clears his throat.  “If I may ask, my…” Satin seems intently searching for the right means of address. “…lord.”

“Just call me Renly.” 

Renly notices that the rest of the room has gone quiet again, and some of the men have turned to face them.

“Why haven’t you tried to leave, my lord? You have something to go back to. A wife, a castle, a family.  Even if you won’t be king, isn't all that worth the risk of escape?”

Renly lost count of the number of times he tried to escape on the journey north. Stannis’s men stopped letting him have even a razor when he used his broken crown as a weapon and tried to stab one of them. When they threw it into the river, Renly had stupidly felt like crying. He wondered, absently, whether it was the same river Arya Stark threw Joffrey’s sword into. He smiled at the memory. Lion’s Tooth. Calling something important didn’t make it so. _Like calling yourself king,_ he heard Stannis’s voice say.

He spoke to the guards as often as he could, if only to keep himself sane. They spoke back only occasionally. One of them, after throwing Renly over his shoulder on his… fourth? … escape attempt, growled, “They’ll take your pretty head off your shoulders if you try this at the Wall. 

“What do you care?” 

“The King is not doing this to kill you.”

“No, he’s doing it so that I will dwell on my crimes and become a humble man.” Renly sneered.

The arm around him tightened, and he wondered if he was indeed going to his death. Whether he died in honor at the wall or at the hands of Stannis’s lackeys on the journey there – what difference would it make?

“I tried,” he says to Satin. The taste of blood is on his tongue, and he absently licks his lip. “And now I am here, and well-guarded.” One of Stannis’s men sits by the door, pointedly looking at Renly, Satin, and Deaf Dick.

“Did you ever know Ned Stark?” The question startles him. 

“I met him when he came south to be my brother’s Hand.” 

“Jon Snow went above the wall with the rangers.”

“Jon Snow? Ned Stark’s bastard?” Renly longs for any connection to home, even the most tenuous.  Ned Stark barely gave Renly more than a passing glance, as though he was not even worthy of his honorable disdain. And Ned had wanted Stannis on the throne.  Well, he might get his wish.

“The rangers who went above the Wall will be back soon...” Satin says, and it sounds like a lie.

He spends the day in his room, hoping some mystery will help him regain his dignity in the eyes of these men.  At the evening meal, the common hall is even more deserted than it was for breakfast. 

“They’re all out digging for buried treasure,” Satin explains, when Renly sits with him and Deaf Dick.

“Buried treasure?”

“Whores,” the pretty young man says. “I’ll show you the way if you want to go. Some of them might even give it up for free for a king.”

Bitterness has crept into Satin’s tone. The fall of his hair reminds Renly of Loras, and he is not letting himself think of Loras.

Perhaps Renly should go, if only to gain the camaraderie of the men here. But the thought of even entering a brothel fills him with disgust and memories of Robert’s drunken laughter. It was bad enough that on the journey north, the beard he had grown made him look like Robert. He was thankful he had no mirrors in which to see it.

“No, no thank you.” If anyone else asks, he can simply claim to be tired. He figures it’s an excuse he can use for the little time he is here, decadent southern lord that he is. “I’ve never been to a brothel before, and I don’t want to start now.” It’s true, and if Satin’s tone is anything to go by, the fact might endear him to this youth.

“What men miss most here is sex,” Satin says, as if he does not believe him. 

“I miss color,” Renly says. 

The northern landscape is bare and wretchedly white, and it makes him feel empty and exposed. Watching glorious greens fade to brown and grey as they went north was like watching the land being leeched.

“What do you miss?” Renly asks Satin.

Satin shakes his head.  "Nothing."

Lying sleepless in his cot that night, Renly thinks about how this young man had come willingly, how little love he seems to bear for Oldtown, and wonders what kind of life would drive someone here so young. It should not be difficult to gain the loyalty of the men here. Renly knows the power of hope, and knows how to inspire it in others, but they cannot act alone. Even if Renly gains the swords of all the men here, and they outnumber Stannis's men four-to-one, they would be fresh recruits, cripples, and stewards against skilled warriors. And Renly knows he must leave as soon as he can. The sadness of his place will seep into his bones if he does not. Perhaps House Tyrell thinks him dead, and all hope lost. If he can get a message to Willas, there is still a chance of marching south in glory and reclaiming his crown. And if not his crown, at least a life that is his own.

The guards outside of his door are wide awake.

 The one on the left frowns. “Can’t sleep?”

“No, I can't. I'm in too much pain from the drills this morning." The guard smirks at each him. "I’d like to see the maester, to see if he has something that will help.”

The man grumbles, but he takes Renly by the arm, leading him across the yard to the rookery. "Maester Aemon is an old man. He doesn't need you bothering him at night."

"I'll come right back if he's asleep, I promise." A whining edge creeps into his voice. Renly has found that when men think he is spoiled, they are less likely to pay attention to what he says and does. Disdain is easy to give in to and blocks out all other thought.

The door to the maester's quarters is unlocked, and the soldier shoves Renly inside and pulls the door shut behind him, so violently that Renly is sure Maester Aemon must be awake, if he was not before.

The maester's quarters are still and warm. The only light comes from a dying fire that illuminates a chair covered in crumpled blankets. Renly slips off his boots and walks as quietly as possible up the tower to the rookery. He scrawls a brief message with the pen and paper outside the rookery door.

_Willas,_

_I am at the Wall, but have not taken the black and will not if I can escape with my life._ _The Night’s Watch needs recruits, so you could send men here under that guise. Castle Black is nearly deserted._

_Send my love to Margaery and Loras._

When he opens the door to the rookery, the ravens cry out. The noise is deafening. In the dark, the names on the cages are nearly impossible to make out, but after what seems an eternity, in which he is certain Stannis's guards will burst in and tear the note from his hands, he finds _Highgarden_.  

The bird allows Renly to clumsily attach his message and takes flight. Watching the raven disappear into the dark, it is hard to believe that tiny slip of paper will make it to Highgarden. The ravens have stopped squawking, and he watches the clouds drift across the night sky until his teeth are chattering with the cold.

He walks carefully down the stairs, using all his effort to make his tall frame and his sore muscles move silently. He manages until the pile of blankets before the fire stirs. He clutches the rail and nearly falls. “Who’s there?” a thin voice calls into the dark. Renly recognizes Maester Aemon now, the small, ancient man who sits beside Bowen Marsh at the high table during meals.

“I’m sorry, maester. I needed to send a message.” He walks down the rest of the stairs and approaches Maester Aemon's chair slowly.

“In the middle of the night?” 

“It’s to my family. So they won’t worry.” It’s half true.

Maester Aemon has skin like paper, and bright eyes that stare straight ahead, as if Renly is invisible or a ghost. He remembers Satin mentioning that the maester at the Castle Black is blind.

“You're Renly Baratheon?” the maester asks.

“How did you know?" 

The old man smiles. “I thought I recognized your voice."

“Recognized?”

“I heard speak at dinner you the night you arrived." There is no judgment in the maester’s voice. “So you thought you were a king?”

There it is.

“I had my reasons.”

Maester Aemon nods. “I am certain you did. Why have you come to my tower? To send for an army to save you?”

“To send for friends.” He thinks of his bannermen at Storm's End arrayed behind Stannis. “If I have any left.”

The maester smiles. “I don’t imagine you were supposed to do that?”

“Not exactly.”

“It is none of my concern. The Night’s Watch takes no part."

Then why, Renly wonders, have they allowed Stannis’s guard to remain?

“I hope you will not ask any of the men here to die for you.”

Months ago, at Highgarden, he had not asked. Lords had fallen to their knees and knights had graciously sworn him fealty, begging for the privilege to serve him. Asking the same sacrifice of the Night’s Watch, of Satin and Dick and all the others, will feel different. If Willas Tyrell should come through, he won’t have to.

“I won't." The words feel final. Something about this frail man commands respect. "I'm sorry I have disturbed you, Maester Aemon.”

"You have not. I hope you visit again."

***

Renly tells himself that he made no promise to Maester Aemon that night. If he is to leave, he will without question need the cooperation of the men at Castle Black. But they need not die for him. Their loyalty combined with Tyrell reinforcements will ensure an easy escape. But waiting for the Tyrells will take time, so Renly reports to Bowen Marsh after breakfast, asking what he can do to help. Bowen Marsh's wary eyes squint in his pomegranate face, and he tells Renly to join the builders at the top of the Wall. So Renly rides in a rickety box to the top of the world.

The Wall is wider than he thought, broad enough for a dozen knights to ride side-by-side. A handful of men are scattered as far as Renly can see, working to pack rough stones into the slippery ice. He does not acknowledge the stares he receives, and instead walks to the far edge of the wall. The cold tears into his skin, he might as well be naked for all the good his clothes do him. But for the moment, he does not mind. He feels wild, standing on the edge of the world. The sky is clear as glass above him and the untamed land to the north seems to melt into the horizon, and he believes every tale of magic he was ever told. 

A firm hand on his arm steadies him.

"Careful. You might fall."

When Renly faces the man, he feels the breath knocked from his chest.

“It's Donal Noye," Donal Noye says as if Renly does not remember him. “You’re the last person I expected to see here, Lord Renly," Donal Noye says.

The sight of the blacksmith's face brings childhood memories rushing back to him, memories he wishes he could bury. The sounds of children crying in the night. Gnawing at shavings of wood until Stannis knocks them from his hands. And Donal Noye's deep voice and cruel words echoing in his head.  He tells himself that last memory is only a remembered nightmare, some fever dream induced by hunger and imagination. But most vivid of all is the look in Stannis's eyes, bright, fierce, desperate, a look he saw again in his burning camp.

 

_“Stand down!” Renly calls out. One knife is at his throat, the other pressed between his ribs, beneath his breastplate. He had only had time to don his breastplate and helm._

_He had fallen asleep next to Loras, disheveled with prayer, and had stirred slowly awake, thinking he was back in Highgarden, with the morning sun spilling over their bed.  Then he was coughing, blinded, stumbling into his armor. Brienne of Tarth carved a path around him, through the flaming tents and a chaos of blood and smoke.  She had a manic look in her eyes, until a rearing horse struck her temple, and she fell for long enough for Stannis's men to disarm him. Then there_ _are knives at his throat and chest, and Stannis is standing before him. Around them, the battle slows to a standstill._

_“Let’s talk,” Renly smiles, though it feels absurd. The fire at his back warms him through his breastplate. “Why don’t we propose a Great Council?  You would have the opportunity to prove that Cersei’s siblings were born of incest and that you’re the Rightful King.”_

_Stannis says nothing._

_“You won’t do it. To be king, you have to be alive. Your men set a hand on me…” Their hands were already all over him, but Renly figures he is clear enough under the circumstances, “and you’ll die.”_

_The fires are reflected in Stannis’s eyes._

_“So let’s talk.”_

_One of the daggers bites into Renly’s throat._

_In a second, both Loras and Brienne lunge forward. One of Stannis’s men fells Brienne. She tries to stagger from the ground, but Renly is not watching because Stannis puts one arm around Loras, the edge of his sword glinting against his skin._

_He cannot think._

_“Stop this!"_

_“Renounce your claim."_

_“Please, Stannis.”_

_Loras struggles in his grasp, trying to twist away._ _Renly’s head spins, his eyes watering in the smoke. He cannot think, cannot formulate anything besides hateful words, and the pounding of his heart._

_“What do you want?” he says._

 

He brushes aside the memories like so much dust and meets Donal Noye's eyes. The one-armed blacksmith is smiling at him. “You look so much like you did when you were a boy."

"What do you mean?" Renly asks.

Donal Noye does not answer his question. "I heard you were sent here as punishment from Stannis." He looks down at Renly, even though Renly is just as tall.

"He needed to send me away. Or else I would have beaten him."

"Men are judged on their merit here, my lord. I hope you will prove equal to the tasks given you. After all..." He smiles. "You were a king."

 

 _I still am one,_  Renly thinks, and returns Donal Noye's smile.  _And my people are coming for me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write about Renly at the Wall (after hearing a joke about it, I became consumed with the idea), and then constructed a way for that to happen with a single canon divergence. As to how he lost the battle... My p.o.v. character was asleep. I plead the Fifth. I'm more interested in character development than plot. Sorry not sorry.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Renly bides his time at the Wall, making friends and awaiting a raven from Highgarden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of a character-driven, backstory-heavy chapter, but this is a character-driven, backstory-heavy story
> 
> Enjoy! :)

Missing Loras comes in tiny moments at first.  Memories dragged out of him forcefully by the smallest things. Satin’s curls in the wind. The smell of mulled wine from the kitchens. (Loras used to steal cups of it from the kitchens in Storm’s End when he was young. “You don’t have to sneak around,” Renly would always remind him. “You can have as much as you like. You’re my squire.”) A certain pattern of footsteps in the yard. Brothers talking about their families back home.

He can fight off the memories when he is alone. His room here is nothing like his quarters in King’s Landing, so there is little to remind him of the past. But some grey mornings, when he is still half in a dream, he listens for Loras’s breath, and the silence without it is deafening.

After a particularly sleepless night, he thinks he sees Loras amongst the recruits at morning drills. The grace of a sword arcing through the air and the arm controlling it catch his eye, and his mind drifts. Just as quickly, he remembers that is impossible, that Loras is not here, but he is distracted just long enough for his opponent to catch him off guard. He stumbles backwards. The puddle his foot falls into seems shallow enough, but it catches him off balance, and his body turns one way, his foot the other.

Pain spirals around his ankle.

“I’m fine,” he says, trying to put weight back onto his foot, only to have it give out beneath him. He falls into the puddle again.

He is aware of the pitiful picture he must make, hair a tangled mat, face swollen with cuts and bruises, mud covering his stinking finery. From the sidelines, Stannis’s men seem to be enjoying the sight. The recruits offer him sympathetic looks, but they cannot all be sincere, because he hears snickering from the back of the crowd. Renly wants to root out the man who laughed and flay him with words, until he realizes that that is exactly what Stannis would do. Instead he accepts the hand that is offered, and allows himself to be led to Maester Aemon. 

In the light of day, Maester Aemon has a kind face, lined with wrinkles as delicate as lace. He still looks like the oldest, frailest man Renly has ever seen, but there is brightness in his blind eyes that belies his age. 

“Good of you to see me again,” he says, as Renly sits down across from him. “What is the problem?”

“I twisted my ankle,” Renly says. When he pulls off his boot, his foot is blistered and bleeding. He washes it in the bucket of water that Maester Aemon’s steward brings them. Maester Aemon’s fragile hands wrap linens firmly about his ankle.

“Does that feel secure?” the maester asks when he has pinned the bandage in place.

“Yes,” Renly says, “thank you.”

“May I ask what brings you here?” Maester Aemon asks. "I wanted to ask you that when I first met you."

“My brother,” Renly answers. He shifts in his chair. “I lost a battle to him, and he gave me the chance to take the black. To prove that he could be merciful.” Renly finds that he has been grinding his teeth and stops in horror. 

“Do you think he was merciful?”

“I am away from everyone and everything I have ever loved.” Renly can almost taste the bitterness on his tongue as he speaks. A man could nurture this kind of bitterness, watch it grow into something much bigger and stronger. “Stannis wanted break my pride. More satisfying to see your enemy broken and groveling than honorably dead.”

He has been less than a week here at the Wall, and Renly knows that Stannis is right. Looking out a window on the bleak white landscape and the bleaker black-clad men scurrying across it, he knows if he should stay here, he will disappear, washed away in a white northern wind, drowned in black wool until he is meaningless. More than dying, more than losing anyone or anything, Renly fears disappearing or being forgotten, and if he does not leave soon, all of that might come to pass.

He runs his hand across the sleeve of his doublet. The gold roses there are brown with dirt and mud. The Tyrells will come for him. He knows they will. But he must be ready when they do. He cannot forget himself.

“Everything I have ever said and done has been to mean something in this world,” Renly says, the stillness of the moment and Maester Aemon’s intensely kind face pulling the words from him, “to leave my mark, to prove that I lived. It was cruelty for Stannis to send me here.”

For a long time, there is only the sound of the fire, and the noise from the men outside.

Maester Aemon’s next words are quiet and clear. “I do not know you, young man, and I do not know your brother. But I have seen many men come and go from Castle Black. I have seen them suffer and I have seen them die, but I have never seen a single one broken.” He smiles. “If that is what your brother wanted, he sent you to the wrong place.”

*

Renly’s sprained ankle has bought him precious time by delaying his training, but he cannot help but be annoyed by it. He can no longer move with any speed, can only ever walk with two tall staffs beneath his arms, and the undignified posture makes his arms and shoulders cramp. But, he reminds himself, his discomfort means nothing if it gives Willas and the Tyrells long weeks in which to send help.

He finds himself thinking of Willas often, wondering what it would be like to live with a pain like this every day of his life. He wonders why Willas has not gone mad with it.

He spends mornings and evenings in the common hall, learning as many names as he can. He has always been good at pairing names with faces, and though the similarity of their garb sometimes makes them melt together, the men of the night’s watch are characters, each and every one. When Renly asks them about their lives before they took the black, they are hesitant at first, but once one man begins to talk, the others quickly follow suit. Renly listens attentively. He asks questions as they speak, reflecting back to each man a version of his story where he is the hero, and watches as they light up. This is how you build an army. Renly wants to tell Stannis’s men to take notes.

The day he sets aside his now disgusting silks and velvets for black wool, blessedly warm and clean, he receives even more stares than usual. He had spent the morning wrestling and hacking at his tangled hair until it was short and uneven. He does not look fully like himself, but he looks nothing like Robert. The most important thing is that he looks like a man of the Night’s Watch. He does not allow himself to wonder whether he looks at all like Stannis. He keeps his old clothes, folded into a small square and tucked into a corner of his room. He is not a black brother yet; they cannot ask him to throw them away.

“Good to see you’re dressing your station,” one of Stannis’s men says, who looks a great deal like Stannis himself, with a balding head and a muscle that moves slowly in his jaw when he is not happy.

“A king is a king, no matter what he wears,” Renly says.

The man’s jaw tenses.

“But of course,” Renly says in mock humility, “I am not a king.” 

The people of Westeros will welcome his return with open arms, Renly knows, but that does not stop his doubts. His bannermen’s swift change of sides made his stomach turn upside down. They will turn back when they see him, they will…

His mind often wanders to what other lives would remain open to him, were he not a king. He could throw his support behind Robb Stark, but Stannis would never make peace with them. He could join with the Lannisters – the thought fills his mouth with bile – and live out his days in peace at Highgarden. He could find passage on a ship to one of the free cities and discover what life there is for a disgraced foreign diplomat in Essos.  Or he could create a new identity there. Turning his mind back to his history and geography lessons, fantastic stories about Volantis and the fall of Valyria fill his memory, but precious little about the current political climate in the east. It had not seemed important at the time.

He spends so long talking with the men in the common hall that it is only a matter of time before someone asks about Margaery.

He lies with as much truth as possible.

“She’s the most beautiful woman in the world,” he tells them. “I grew up with the Tyrells. Their youngest son was sent to squire for me, and his family often visited Storm’s End.”

He first saw Margaery when she was still a girl, walking along a low fence in Storm’s End, her arms extended on either side of her. One silk-clad foot slipped, and he caught her in his arms before she fell.

“Thank you, my lord,” she said and curtsied primly when he placed her on the ground. “You saved me!”

“You’re Lady Margaery Tyrell?”

“Yes, my family arrived just this morning, my lord.”

“Be more careful next time,” he said, smiling. “Ladies don’t walk on fences.”

“How would you know? You’re not a lady,” she said. Her face seemed very serious, but there was a glint of mischief in her eyes.

“You may be right,” he said, because there was nothing else to say.

“Excuse me, my lord,” she said and curtsied again, lifting her dress delicately, so that the hem did not touch the ground, then breaking into a run across the yard to the broad-shouldered youth returning from the stables. The young man scooped her up in his arms and spun her in a circle. Margaery shrieked in glee. This young man must be one of Margaery's brothers. Renly had never seen a noble family behave so boisterously with each other, but he supposed things were done differently in the Reach. 

Renly greeted each of the Tyrells in turn, Garlan, Margaery, Mace, Alerie, all except Willas, whose bad leg prevented him from making the journey to Storm’s End. When they gathered together, love seemed to fill the space between them, its warmth almost palpable. Standing so close to that without being a part of it burned.

Renly distracted himself from his loneliness by showing the Tyrells all there was to see at Storm’s End and playing the role of charming host at the feast to welcome them. When he finally slipped away, Garlan and Margaery were playing together, watched over by their loving parents, and he knew he would not be missed.  

He slipped away to a corner of Storm’s End where he knew he could be alone, a small nook within the castle walls filled with trees, flowers, and the sounds of the sea. Renly no longer believed he was the first to discover this place, as he had when he was a child, but finding it required enough aimless wandering and crawling through small passageways that it would never be crowded like the sept, the godswood, or the castle’s larger gardens.

He sat beneath the tree closest to the castle walls, where he could just glimpse the sea through a small gap in the stones. He sat balanced on the roots, careful of his fine clothes.

The northmen thought their gods resided in weirwoods, with their grotesquely human faces; and Renly had been taught growing up to seek his gods in the castle’s sept. But the older he grew, the more Renly thought the gods could follow you anywhere, and he always felt a strange connection to them when he was truly alone and did not even have to think about wearing a mask.

“My lord?”

Renly turned suddenly.

Loras Tyrell stood in the narrow entrance to Renly’s secret grove. His squire must have followed him all the way from the feast. 

Before Renly could school his expression into something pleasant, the Tyrell boy asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Renly smiled. 

“You don’t look it, my lord.”

 _I thought I was alone._ It was not Renly’s fault that the boy had not learned tact, but somehow he was suffering from it.  Renly sighed. “I promise you. I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“What is this place?” Loras asked.

Renly shrugged. “I found it when I was a child. Do you like it?”

“It reminds me of Highgarden.” The boy was wearing a crown of flowers that Margaery had made for him, now resting askew on his brown curls. 

“Your family seems very happy. Are you glad to see them?” he said. 

“I am, my lord,” Loras said, and his lips curled upwards. This was the first time Renly had seen his squire smile, which meant that he had not had a reason to for the entire first year he had been at Storm’s End. The thought made Renly feel strangely guilty.

Loras’s genuine smile was small.  It came from his warm, brown eyes as much as from his lips and lit up his entire face. For that moment, Renly felt like he was a part of the happiness that surrounded the Tyrells, and he knew that he would do anything he could to see that smile every day.

“They can visit as often as they want,” Renly said.

“Thank you, my lord.” 

“You don’t have to call me ‘my lord’?”

The smile disappeared. “You don’t like it?”

“I mean, I like it, but everybody does… and…” _And I want a friend._ “And we see each other so often, it would be ridiculous.”

Loras just smiled again and sat next to him in silence. The sounds of the sea wrapped them together. Renly could not remember feeling so close to another person.

Renly shakes his head. He will become Robert, losing himself in the past, if he is not careful.

“I knew Margaery for many years. We fell in love slowly as we grew up together.”

“You must miss her,” Satin says.

“I want the best for her.” For all of them. Which is why he must return.

**

When he is not sharing stories with the men in the common hall, he often visits Maester Aemon, to offer what assistance he can with writing correspondence and tending to the ravens. 

“Have you ever thought of becoming a maester?” Maester Aemon says one day.

Renly wants to laugh. Even after seeing life at the Wall, nothing has ever seemed so miserable to him as spending his life reading the words of dead men written on dead trees.

“You think I should?”

“You’re intelligent,” is all Maester Aemon says.

There is a small rustling from the rookery, the sound of a returning raven.

“How can you tell that?” Renly asks him, resealing the jar of black ink now staining his fingers. 

“It’s not an uncommon thing for a man to be.” 

“I’m a frivolous man, Maester Aemon. That’s what everyone says, and they are not wrong.” 

“Clydas, will you see to the raven?” Maester Aemon says.

As Clydas climbs the steps to the rookery, Maester Aemon turns to him. “Are you upset,” he asks, “because people have said that about you?” 

Renly is glad Maester Aemon cannot see the expression on his face. “I’m perfectly happy being frivolous. Why shouldn’t I be?” He wishes there were some polite way to indicate his discomfort with the turn their conversation has taken. “Were you expecting a raven to return today? I didn’t know you had sent any recently.”

“I would be very unhappy if I were called frivolous.”

“No one would ever say that about you,” Renly says, and the words are genuine. 

No one ever insulted Renly to his face, but that does not mean he did not hear what they had to say. Most recently, when he and Loras thought they were alone in a small, winding corridor in the Red Keep. Renly heard the murmuring voices first, and yanked on Loras’s doublet until they were pressed close to each other in a small alcove. The intimacy of it would look suspicious if they were discovered, but that was far preferable to running into Jaime and Cersei.

“I don’t like what he said about you. I never like it when he opens his mouth," Jaime said, a strange mix of anger and tenderness in his voice. 

“I don’t care what he says, Jaime! He’s an empty, hollow man, some evil shadow of Robert who has taken it upon himself to torment me.” 

Jaime murmured something in reply, and then they were gone. 

Loras’s breath was soft at Renly’s ear. “I’ll punch her,” Loras promised.

“Don’t offer to hit a woman, Loras. Not for me.”

“I’ll punch him.” 

“Would that I could join you.”

Loras was smiling. They were so close, Renly could feel it. “Who says you can’t punch Jaime Lannister?” 

“My brother…” Renly turned his head and kissed Loras. “The small council…” He kissed him again. “Probably Tywin Lannister?” 

“The Lannisters are stupid,” Loras said.

Renly kissed him harder.

Cersei’s words did not matter then, but they seemed to now.

“Men tend to be honest at the Wall,” Renly tells Maester Aemon. “In King’s Landing, they say things just to say them. Of course you should mind if someone said something unkind about you here, because here it matters. Nothing said in the south means anything. Which is why I don’t care.”

Clydas clears his throat.  He is approaching with a sealed letter in his hand. “Maester Aemon, it’s a letter from Highgarden.”

Renly almost stands on his bad ankle. “Give it to me.”

Clydas nervously looks between Renly and Maester Aemon.

“Open it, Clydas,” Maester Aemon says. 

Clydas nervously cracks open the green wax seal and unrolls the scroll. “I believe it’s for Lord Renly,” he says. 

“Thank you,” Renly says. He can barely restrain himself from snatching the scroll from Clydas’s hands. He tells himself to read slowly.

 

_My Dear Renly,_

_I hope this finds you safe and sound, and I dearly hope that you realize by the end of this letter why I cannot send any men to the Wall._

_You have not been forgotten. Far from it. Ser Robar Royce mounted a rescue mission, but he was slaughtered alongside his men before they reached the Riverlands. Stannis still has Loras as his prisoner, and while I am sure my little brother would hate it, it’s given father pause about attempting any attack against him._

_But none of that is any reason I cannot send you help._

_Almost as soon as you departed Storm’s End, Petyr Baelish arrived at Bitterbridge to negotiate a second marriage for Margaery, to Joffrey Lannister. Father claimed that your union with Margaery had never been consummated, and that your imminent arrival at the Wall rendered her an unwed maiden again._ _With this alliance with the Lannisters, we have the chance to crush Stannis, save Loras, and sit Margaery on the throne, and we have a better chance of it succeeding than of sending enough men through the Riverlands to save you. Perhaps we can beg a pardon from the Iron Throne and save you from a life in the Night’s Watch, but we could not return your crown._

_I wish I could do more. My best advice is to delay taking your vows and to make the most of the circumstances you are in. I am truly sorry._

_With Love,_

_Willas Tyrell_

 

A pit settles in his stomach. “They sided with the Lannisters.”

_to negotiate a second marriage for Margaery, to Joffrey Lannister_

He reads the line over again and again, to be sure he has really seen those words.

When Joffrey was a young boy, he mutilated his toy knights and his sister’s stolen dolls and took great pleasure in the disgust that it brought those around him. Renly remembers fearing the little boy, where he had only hated Cersei and grown increasingly disgusted with Robert. Joffrey is the worst of each of them, compounded ten times over. He thinks of Ned Stark’s daughter, engaged for months to that little monster, and wonders again where that man got his notions of honor. And now Mace Tyrell has sold him Margaery.

Renly imagines Joffrey sitting in the Iron Throne, still playing with toys, but now it’s not Myrcella’s doll he picks and pulls at, but Margaery, and his clawing hands draw blood.

Images of Margaery are chased from his mind by images of Loras. Loras chained to a prison cell in Storm’s End, his wrists raw and bloody from pulling at the chains. Loras lying motionless on the stones of the courtyard. Loras tortured, Loras dying, and all because of him.

"No one is coming for them," he says.

_And no one is coming for you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are more than welcome, as always


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Renly gets drunk after receiving Willas's letter and tries to find a place amongst the stewards at the Wall.

He gets drunk. 

After a lifetime of avoiding it, he knows just how. He forgoes his evening meal despite the grumblings of his stomach, and when he’s given his mug of ale, drinks it as quickly as possible. When he is done, he downs another mug. Halfway through his fourth, well and truly pissed that it has had no effect on him, he tries to stand, ready to retire to bed, and the room tilts. He sinks down to the bench, and all the horrible thoughts he wanted to avoid come flooding back to him. His mind feels unfocused, unable to grasp onto one or push another away.

He’s been drunk before, at his wedding feast, with Mace Tyrell and his bannermen proposing toast after toast, but that night he had the cheers of the crowd to buoy him up, and he wasn’t really as intoxicated as everyone thought.

This is different.

“This might’ve been a mistake,” he says slowly. 

He swore off drunkenness ten years before, at Stannis and Selyse’s wedding, after Robert was discovered in their brother’s wedding bed, Delena Florent pressed naked on the sheets beneath him. Renly had retired early that night, but Dragonstone was abuzz with stories the following morning. So Renly had decided then and there that nothing good could come from drunkenness, and had told Stannis so the next time he saw him. Stannis had not smiled, but he had not frowned either. “I’m not your mother, Renly,” was all he said. “You can do as you please.” 

Growing older and discovering House Lannister’s affinity for wine only strengthened his resolve. The bannermen sworn to Storm’s End would laugh indulgently at feasts, numbering it amongst their lord paramount’s charms that he only took a single glass of wine with the evening meal - an odd quirk in one so young, they said, and the only kind of moderation Lord Renly knew. But when Loras first traveled with him to King’s Landing and they feasted with King Robert, his young squire, who had seemed so much like a spoiled, careless child, had whispered in Renly’s ear that he understood completely.

_Loras._

His hand slipping into Renly’s when he thinks no one can see them, feeling like the most intimate thing they ever did.  Had the Tyrells tried to rescue him, and what would happen if they did?

Anger at Mace Tyrell boils in his stomach. Fucking opportunist. Renly wondered if the man heard a single word of his impassioned speech that he had to take the throne, because Lannister rule would drag Westeros into disaster: they had killed Robert, were going to kill Ned, and would have killed him and Loras with him if they had not left King’s Landing that very night. He thought his fine words had mattered, but he might as well have said he only wanted fame and glory. After all, what did intentions matter in the end?

He holds his mug of ale in both hands and gulps.

Why did it have to be _Joffrey_? Margaery deserves the world, and Renly had selfishly thought he could give it to her. Whether he had been right or wrong, she deserves so much better than Joffrey. Joffrey who had smiled when Ned Stark killed his daughter’s direwolf, Joffrey who had laughed when his little brother slipped and fell on the steps outside of the Red Keep. He wonders, absently, whether Robert had ever laughed at Stannis like that.

He shakes his head as if it will banish thoughts of Stannis from his mind, and tries to think of a better match for Margaery. Perhaps he could writes back to Willas, and Mace could take it into consideration?

He returns to a strange fantasy then, of meeting with Robb Stark and watching warmth grow between him and Margaery. For the purposes of the fantasy, Margaery had already given Renly a son, and they had enough privacy for her to invite the young wolf to warm her bed. There would be no distance between Riverrun and King’s Landing, and Renly would no longer have to worry about giving her everything. Love between the King in the North and the Queen in the South would thrive, and Westeros with it. 

But the Riverlands were a world away from the Reach, and Mace wanted the Iron Throne. The Young Wolf would only ever rule one half of the kingdom, and not even that if Stannis had his way. His bitter brother could prove an even more vicious rival than the Lannisters and shudders to think of what lengths Stannis might go to to win back the North.

“They sold her to the Lannisters.”

“Who?” asks Satin. 

Renly looks at the boy sitting opposite him. He did not know he had company.

“Mace Tyrell sold his daughter to the Lannisters. I haven’t even taken my vows yet.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I’m not a king anymore! Never was one, was I?” He drains the last dregs of ale.

“You told us that a king could be made any number of ways.”

“You listened to me? Then you’re a fool.” He snorts and waves his empty mug at a black brother passing by their table. “More ale?" 

“Maybe not?” Satin says softly. 

“What does it matter? My life’s over.”

 “Your life is not over. A man’s past crimes are wiped clean when he takes the black.” The poor boy really seems to believe the words.

“And what are your crimes?” Renly rests his chin on his hand. “You’re a young boy – a pretty boy. Is that your crime?”

Behind him, a group of black brothers laughs. 

“Whasss so funny?” Renly mutters.

“Satin’s crimes,” one says. 

“I don’t think the boy would charge you anything," another says and turns to Satin, “Is that it? Wanna give it to a king for free, whore?”

Satin stands.

Renly sneers at the men. “Don’t say things like that. S’not nice. Just cause he’s prettier than you doesn’t mean he’s a whore.”

“Come on, tell ‘im, Satin.”

“Tell me what?” 

Satin meets Renly’s eyes, and there is no embarrassment in them. “It’s not a lie. I was a whore in Oldtown.” He then looks over at the laughing men. “Why is it so important that everyone know?”

Renly thinks back to the bright, tattered silks Satin was wearing weeks ago and wishes he could think of something good to say, but his mouth hangs open and his mind will not cooperate.

“I think you’ve had enough, _Your Grace_ ,” one of the laughing men says.

“Shut up.” Renly stands suddenly, knocking over his bench in the process. “All of you.”

Would they laugh at Renly the same way if they knew his secrets? He raises himself to his full height, ready to speak because he does not fight with his fists. Right now, he cannot think of why. He wants to smash all their laughing faces.  “Who were you before you came to the Wall, anyway? Criminals? Pitiful smallfolk? Sad, ordinary men with no purpose to your lives? Whoever you were, you’re no better than him, and you’re no better than me!”

“Never said that,” one of them mutters.

“Don’t even think it,” Renly says. When he hobbles from the common hall, three of Stannis’s men follow him.

“Go away!” 

“Where you going?” one of the men says.

“My room. Let me be.” 

The three of them surround him. “Can we help you there, my lord?” 

“I said let me be! Go tell Stannis I’m broken. I have no chance of opposing him now. And look, I’m drunk, too! I’m a poor man’s Robert. _Is that what he wants to hear_?”

They move aside and let him pass. Renly lies on his bed hungry and cold that night, and he does not sleep.

*

Bowen Marsh approaches him while Renly breaks his fast alone the following morning. Renly’s head is pounding too much to think of witty conversation, his stomach feels like a bottomless pit, and he is almost too focused on the food to notice the Head Steward approaching his table.

“Lord Renly?” Bowen Marsh glowers down at him.

“Yes?” Compared to Marsh’s bellowing voice, Renly sounds like a mouse.

“Is there anything you would care to share about last night?”

“I don’t think I can hold my alcohol very well.”  He smiles.  "It won't happen again."

“That does not concern me.”

“Then what does concern you?”

The wide red face frowns. “I heard you said a group of my stewards were no better than whores.”

Renly rolls his eyes. “That is not what I said. Not at all. Rest assured, Lord Steward.” He wants to say that most of Bowen Marsh’s men had neither the good looks nor the arithmetic to be whores, but he also wants to avoid any confrontation that might lead the Lord Steward to raise his voice.

“The other thing I heard was that you’ve abandoned any idea of escaping your guard and returning south.” 

“That’s true,” Renly says.

“Then I believe it is time for you to start training for work amongst the stewards.” 

He feels his mouth hanging open stupidly. “Oh.”

“Did you hope to be considered for the rangers, my lord? I am certain that could be arranged if you succeed in your training.”

“I still can’t stand on my own,” is all he says.

Bowen Marsh shrugs. “Today Donal Noye needs help in the forge, and you can help him sitting down.” 

**

“Lord Renly?” Donal Noye extends his hand to him when Renly enters the armory. The air inside is hot and heavy, and a welcome change from the windblown white landscape.

“Bowen Marsh sent me. He said you needed help,” Renly says.

“Come, sit down,” Donal Noye says, all the judgment from their talk at the top of the Wall gone from his voice. “The other recruits are training, and right now I could do with someone with two hands to man the bellows.”

Renly perches on a stool next to the fire. So close he can feel sweat beginning to run down inside his smallclothes. He keeps his gloves on, but takes off his cloak and unlaces his outer tunic before gripping the bellows and pressing the two handles together. He’s seen it done before.

Donal Noye holds himself proudly before his fire, only a leather apron over his barrel chest. Renly finds his eyes drawn again and again to the ugly seam at his left shoulder where his arm should be. Noye examines the heavy sword half-buried in the coals, hefts it up, and places it down on his anvil.

Renly moves towards the anvil and holds down the sword’s hilt.

“Thank you.” Donal Noye says, picking up his hammer. “You seem better settled in than when I first saw you here.” The hammer lands on the sword, the strike jolting up Renly’s arms.

“I am?” 

“I see you’ve given up your rags.” 

“They weren’t very warm.”

“You all right?” Donal Noye says, his eyes shifting from the sword to the pained expression on Renly’s face.

“I drank last night, so I’m not exactly on my toes.”

Donal Noye chuckles. “Maybe you are Robert’s little brother, after all.”

“Did you know him well? My brother Robert?”

Donal Noye is silent for a long time, the hammer in his hand echoing the hammer in Renly’s head. “He was a fine man and a fine soldier.”

“Are they the same thing?”

Donal Noye wipes his brow. “The best qualities of a man make the best soldiers. Courage, strength, steadfastness in the face of danger, selflessness…” He continues hammering until the orange glow has faded from the sword, and sticks it back into the coals.

“Who sent you to the Wall?” Renly asks. “You can clearly still do your job. I wasn’t Lord of Storm’s End at the time, was I?”

Donal Noye chuckles and wipes his sooty hands on his apron. “Don’t try.”

“Try what?”

“Buttering me up the way you do the rest of them. It won’t work on me. Let me guess.” He faces Renly.  "If you had made the decision, you would have kept me in the service of Storm’s End, a great boon for a crippled man like me. You would have been so much kinder than either of your brothers.”

Renly feels like his armor is being stripped away. “I didn’t mean any of that.” He steadies himself with one hand against the armory wall. “I just didn’t know why you ended up here if you’re able to do the same work – and so well!” Renly smiles.

Donal Noye’s smile disappears, leaving a harsh face covered with black bristle. “I don’t care for your flattery. I didn’t care for it when you were a child, and I don’t care for it now.”

“What did I do so wrong when I was a child?”

Renly remembers the blacksmith’s boisterous laugh and the sinking feeling that it is at his expense. He remembers being glad that Donal Noye left – that big, scary man who smiled at everyone except him.

“You were a wild creature and had every man, woman, and child in the castle wrapped around your little finger.” 

“I was seven years old then.  You know nothing about who I am now.”

“I’ve heard of your exploits.  Taking your brother’s throne because you wanted it… holding court in obscene luxury… befriending the Tyrells.” He says _Tyrells_ as though the word is poison in his mouth. “You are nothing like Robert.”

“Thank you.”

The look in Donal Noye’s eyes threatens to freeze the very air inside the armory. “Do not speak ill of the dead.”

“I thought you disliked my gift for flattery,” Renly says. “I knew Robert well, and I am proud to be nothing like him.”

Donal Noye snorts. “Really? Your giant army and antlered helm said otherwise.”

“Just because I used his image to become king does not mean that I approved of what he did. Having an antlered helm does not make me the sort of man who strikes his children.”

“Robert is dead. What use is there in spitting on his name?” Donal Noye looks down into the glowing coals as if he cannot even bear to look at Renly.

“For most of my childhood, I did not know Robert,” Renly says, “and it was a shock to me when I learned that he was not the hero I had been led to believe in.”

“He was more a hero than a man like you could ever hope to be.” Donal Noye pulls the sword from the coals again. “I would like you to leave.”

***

“What do you mean, _you cannot work with him?"_

“I simply do not believe he wants my help,” Renly says to Bowen Marsh, his voice as smooth and conciliatory as he can make it. Let Donal Noye take the blame, if any is to be had. 

“Donal Noye himself told me he ‘Would rather work with honest men.’ Can you explain what he meant?”

Renly shrugs.

“Are you not an honest man?”

“I do not believe Donal Noye likes me.  He never liked me at Storm's End, and he doesn't now.”

Bowen Marsh frowns. “When a man takes the black, he sets aside all past loyalties and feuds. Are you telling me he has not?”

Renly speaks carefully. “We have history. Until today, I did not know how much.”

Bowen Marsh sniffs. “Not to worry. There are many other jobs to be done at Castle Black." 

Those other jobs include emptying chamber pots, caring for the horses, washing and mending uniforms, and assisting the builders. Renly drifts from one to the next. Horses do not like him the way that people do, and he hates the physical labor required from the builders, but he hates emptying chamber pots even more. His hope of finding something that he is good at fades when he finally ends up in the kitchens with the cook accurately named Three-Finger Hobb. All in all, the kitchens are not the worst part of Castle Black. They are warm, but not the blistering warmth of the forge, and the smell reminds him of King’s Landing.

Hobb looks down with a frown at the potatoes Renly has chopped.

“What’s wrong?” Renly asks.

Hobb shrugs. “You’re a lord. You’ve never had to do anything like this before."

“Then could you tell me how to do it right?”

“Not like that.”

Between his frustration, and the way his mind insists on wandering from the dull work, he cuts himself three different times that day. Hobb laughs when he returns from serving the evening meal. “If this one’s better than usual, it’s ‘cause there’s about a pint of Lord Renly’s blood in it.” It’s not cruel laughter, though, and one of the kitchen boys tells him, “My first day, I nearly chopped a finger off."

The bigger mistake comes the next day, when Hobb is cooking chickens whole, and Renly casually mentions “That’s not how we made it at Highgarden.”

Hobb pulls himself up to his full height and gestures at the giant ovens. “Really? Then show me, my lord.”

“I… I don’t know how.”

Hobb lets him be, but does not speak to him for three more days. 

As Renly grows accustomed to the repetitive work, he begins to find a comfort in it. He applies himself with focus and fastidiousness to the job, things Stannis taught him so many years ago, most likely without realizing it. After all, doing any work badly is boring. He finds that focusing on the task at hand frees his mind, to daydream and to make plans.  His dreams of  Highgarden turn to dreams of lands to the East, of the Titan of Braavos, of the infamous pleasure houses of Lys, of the markets of Volantis. These dreams, in turn, become thoughts of exactly how much gold would be required for passage East, of the distance to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. His hands move quickly, deft and precise as his plan takes form. He will not become Robert, a great man languishing in memory, going to rot because he cannot see the way forward.

That night he makes a small fire in his room. He feeds his old rags to the flames piece by piece until he comes upon a small patch of embroidery, a single rose, which somehow escaped the mud and dirt and violence of the past months. He cuts it out and affixes it to the inside of his tunic with a borrowed needle and thread. He is not going home, and he cannot stay here, so this small piece of who he was will come with him. He will finish his training. He will take his vows and break them. There is no other choice. He will ride to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and whatever lies beyond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone enjoyed the Season 7 premiere last night! 
> 
> Up next in this story, the entrance of a certain bastard who knows nothing. 
> 
> I have a lot of thoughts about how Renly interacts with expected notions of masculinity in canon, and because of them, I do not want to make him "grow" in this story through learning traditionally masculine skills. Ergo, the kitchens. 
> 
> On a lighter note, this was rather how I pictured his encounter with alcohol at the start of this chapter:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e40y7fVbzqc - "This ale is defective."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scary stories to tell in the dark
> 
> THIS CHAPTER NOW EDITED to better reflect the timeline of A Storm of Swords, and because the author is a horrible perfectionist who can't leave anything alone. I hope the additional content makes the story flow better.

Cold and boredom are the only things to fear at the Wall. Only cold and boredom, and yet, some nights, they hang like stormclouds over Castle Black. Renly is going to die of boredom here, dreaming of the Free Cities, before he’s had even half a chance of dying from something interesting. 

Stannis’s men, at first standoffish, have begun to pull their weight at the Wall, working with the builders and the stewards, only one or two ever watching over Renly at any given time. Renly wonders if some of them might even stay and take vows of their own. Hutton Humphrey, a man who had never spoken once on the road, and who had seemed to take almost gleeful pleasure in dragging Renly around, began working with the stewards and every time Renly sees him now, he has a wide smile on his face.

On the coldest, stillest night yet, Renly reminds Bowen Marsh that he is ready to take his vows.

“The master at arms will decide when you are ready,” the Head Steward says.

On that night as on all nights, the black brothers whisper that the rangers who went beyond the Wall still have not returned.

“The old bear’s never coming back,” Hobb says as Renly helps him serve the evening meal. “We should pick a new Lord Commander, and be done with it.”  

“Don’t say things like that,” Donal Noye mutters.

Whenever the men discuss the Great Ranging, they speak in whispers. The loudest sounds are the crackling fire and the scrape of cutlery, and it is easy to feel the emptiness in the common hall. Castle Black was built with thousands in mind, and the scant few hundreds that now remain try their best to fill it, but they cannot illuminate every dark corner and fill every empty alcove.

“You think the Others got him?” asks Othell Yarwick.

“Of course not,” says Donal Noye. 

“The Others? You can’t tell me men like you believe in children’s tales,” Renly says. Some of Stannis’s men laugh, but a hush falls over the black brothers.

Renly believed in every tale of magic he ever heard as a child until he was, in Stannis’s words, “embarrassingly old for songs,” but now that he is at the Wall, those strange tales fill the blackness outside, and he no longer wants to believe in them. 

“You’ve seen the haunted wood,” Yarwick says.

Renly remembers the forest extending north until it dissolved into an expanse of white. Monsters are too easy to believe in here, but he will not let them know that. “I have. And I believe there may be creatures there that no one in Westeros has ever seen. The rangers could have been eaten, killed by wildlings, or fallen victim to the elements. But monsters…?”  Renly shrugs. “Is there not already enough in the world to be afraid of?”

“I saw the wight,” one of the black brothers says. “It rose from the dead and tried to kill the Lord Commander…” 

This isn’t the first time Renly has heard the story. “Had you considered that the dead man may not have been dead?”

“Jon Snow saw it. He killed the thing with fire.”

Renly has not heard the story discussed so openly, and no one seems to object to its absurdity. A chill runs up his spine. “You can kill living men with fire.”

“You think the wight wasn’t dead?” Donal Noye asks him. “His hands were black and his eyes were blue.”

“Some men have blue eyes,” Renly says with a laugh. “The man could have been close to death in the cold, and could have… woken up when he was returned to Castle Black?”

Donal Noye narrows his eyes. “Woken up?”

“Why not?” 

“They’re coming back,” mutters another black brother, a chinless steward named Lyndon who could be anywhere between thirty and sixty. His bottom lip sticks out, and it makes him look like a child. “The Old Bear and the rest of them. They’re coming back. They have to.”

Renly remembers begging Stannis in the same tone of voice, so many years ago. _Robert’s coming back, isn’t he? He has to._

When Renly finally settles with his meal, most of the men have left the common hall, so he takes his stew to the kitchens. The heat and familiarity of the place begin to banish images of dead men walking.

The Wall was built to protect Westeros, but that story might be nothing more. That was the problem with old stories. When Loras was shaking with fear during his first storm at Storm’s End, Renly had comforted him with the tale of how the castle was built, claiming that they had nothing to fear from thunder and lightning. Before Loras’s arrival, Renly had determined to be merely polite and distant with Mace Tyrell’s youngest son, but he found himself moved by this small, brash boy who refused to admit that he was frightened. At the time, Renly thought there was probably more power and magic in the story itself than there was in all of Storm’s End, to make this strange and foreboding place into the boy's home. 

Satin finds him in the kitchens. “Thought I’d find you here,” he says. “Is our company not good enough for you?” 

“Well, you see, the rats have better stories," Renly says. 

Satin sits down across from Renly. In the past weeks, the boy’s unassuming charm has begun to win over the men of the Night’s Watch. Renly wonders if he possesses that skill as well. He used to be certain that he did, but that was before his army left him for Stannis, the least charming man who has ever lived. He might need to rely on his charm in the Free Cities, if his noble name yields no currency. He wants to go to Myr, but might end up in Braavos, where the name Robert Baratheon must be despised. Being the brother of Westeros's greatest debtor would not be to his advantage. 

"Better stories than you?" Satin says and pushes back his dark curls.

"Of course not." 

Renly wonders, not for the first time, whether he should ask Satin to accompany him on his escape. The prospect of journeying across the narrow sea makes him lonely just thinking of it. Satin would likely interpret any such invitation as a romantic proposition, and looking across the table now, Renly wonders if that would be so bad. If he goes to Essos, he will never see Loras again, and eventually he will move on… Eventually. He cannot compare Satin, or anyone else for that matter, to Loras. He and Loras were brought together by wondrous circumstance and had the chance to grow up side-by-side before they fell in love, or as they were falling in love. The exact timeline doesn't matter anymore. Nothing can compare to that intimacy, and no one he will ever meet will be as blunt as Loras, as devastatingly beautiful, as earnest, as good, as dear...

Satin is a good friend. That might be the closest thing to love he can expect right now.

“It’s getting so cold here, I’ve finally begun to miss Oldtown,” Satin says.

“Anything in particular?” 

“Everything… the house where I worked... the people there. The lady who ran it made sure everyone was taken care of.” 

“The lady who…” Renly drifts off. 

Satin smiles. “You want to know what it was like?”

“I can’t help but be a little curious,” Renly says. “Just a little. You don’t have to say anything.” 

“Ask.” 

Renly finds he already has several questions. “Were you the only boy there?” 

“One of three, but I think I was the prettiest.” Satin grins.

Renly flirts all the time, usually with people whom he has no real interest in pursuing. People flirt with him, usually people who have no real interest in pursing him. And flirting certainly doesn't make him flustered like this. He owns a book of risqué pictures from Dorne, for gods’ sake, but right now he feels like he is being charmed. Not looked up to as a noble, but charmed by someone treating him as an equal, and it pricks at him in unexpected ways.

“Seducing people can be fun,” Satin continues. “Some of the men who came to the brothel were dead-set against even looking at a boy, so it felt good to change their minds. To see a glimmer of attraction and draw it out.”

“I can imagine.”

“The rest of it…” Satin shrugs. “It’s just a job. All jobs are just using your body in different ways..” There is neither seduction nor sadness in Satin’s voice now. Without the chance to share in the juicy secret or offer pity, Renly doesn't know how to respond.

“Why did you defend me?” Satin asks. 

“Defend you?”

“That night you got drunk.”

“Oh…” Renly considers brushing it off with a smile and some nice words about wanting to do the right thing, but that would be a lie.  “I had a dear friend in King’s Landing. Loras Tyrell.” 

“The Knight of Flowers? The most famous knight in the seven kingdoms?”

 _The most famous knight in the seven kingdoms_. Renly thinks, his heart swelling. _Loras would love to hear that._

“He was my squire, and over the years, we grew close. People talked.” That part was true. There had been talk about him and Loras long before they’d ever lain together. “I didn’t mind it so much, but he hated it.”

The rumors about them never spread very far, but Cersei could be particularly cruel, muttering about “Lord Renly’s whore” whenever Loras was in earshot. 

That night, Loras had brought his ferocity to bed, and Renly let himself be carried along by his passion. 

“I don’t care about me. I don’t like how they talk about you,” Loras had said afterward, legs tangled with Renly’s, arms wrapped around his waist. Their chambers in King’s Landing were dark, not even a single sliver of light breaking through Renly’s heavy curtains.

“They’re calling you the whore, not me,” Renly had said.

Loras shoved him onto his back.

“What?”

“It’s meant as an insult for you, too. You should tell Cersei to shut up.”

Renly snorted. “That would go over well.”

“You should fight for yourself.”

“I do.” He ran his hands through Loras’s hair. “Not the way you like to fight, but I do…” 

“I don’t like it,” Loras said to the darkness, and Renly had wished more than anything that he could spirit them away.

Satin clears his throat. “I think I’ll be going…”

Renly realizes he had been staring at a pile of dirty plates and bowls. He does not know for how long.

“Sleep well,” he tells Satin’s retreating shadow.

He should not stay here a moment longer than he has to. 

He needs to leave here, and soon. Perhaps he need not even wait to take his vows, he need only wait for a little bit of chaos.

That very night, chaos arrives. He always gets what he wishes for.

*

The sound of the horn tears through Castle Black. Renly screams as he wakes. When the terrible noise does not end, he kicks the blankets off his bed and runs to his window. The blast ends. In its absence, silence sounds just as piercing. He is almost afraid to breathe.

After an eternity, a voice calls out, “Rangers returning!” The creaking of the gate being raised is soon drowned out by hundreds of voices. Castle Black is suddenly awake, and in the resulting chaos, he might have a chance to escape.

He ties his coin purse to his belt. It is woefully light; he had been planning to find more coin before leaving, but there is no time. Bundling himself against the cold, he pushes past his single guard, who is still disoriented and groggy. “They need me in the kitchens,” he says quickly as he runs down the stairs. Once in the yard, he looks down at his feet, and makes his way through frantically running men, towards the stables.

“Renly?” 

He does not look up. No one could recognize him like this. 

“Renly!” Donal Noye calls again. “Where are you headed?"

With all the commotion in the yard, at least a dozen men must have heard that. Renly breathes evenly and forces himself to smile at Donal Noye. He has found that smiling gives him a chance to gather his thoughts without anyone seeing the cogs turning in his mind. “The kitchens.”

“They’re the other way.”

He cannot clearly see Donal Noye’s face in the light of the flickering torches being carried across the yard, but he would hazard there is no amusement there.

“Thank you,” Renly says. “I’m headed there now.” He crosses the yard. He can reach stables from a different angle. He walks slowly across the yard, and comes nearly to a halt where he sees a crowd gathered around a handful of men.  

“Where are the others, Edd?” Bowen Marsh is asking a thin-faced man, angry puffs of smoke spurting from his mouth. “The rest of your party, where are they!" 

"They killed them all," the thin man says. 

"Who killed them? The wildlings."

The thin man, already pale as death, grows even paler. “The Others," he says. "The dead killed them all."

 **

The men of Castle Black are gathered once more in the common hall, and Edd Tollett is telling them stories.

“They had bright blue eyes” the ranger says, “and black hands.”

Renly shivers. He rests the heavy pot of soup on the long table, now filled with slowly unfreezing rangers.

“We tried to kill them, and we did, there were so many of them.” He shakes his head. “They would not have come if I hadn’t been there, I know that.”

“I am sure that’s not true,” Renly says, setting a bowl of soup before him.

Edd blinks and rubs at his eyes. “Who – who are you?”

Renly does not want to answer. Each new introduction here at the Wall has made him feel smaller and smaller, his name sound less and less like his own.

“Renly Baratheon,” he mutters.

“What?”

“His name is Renly,” says Donal Noye. “He’s new.”

“Renly? Like the king?” Edd asks.

“Yes, like the king.” The blacksmith gives Renly a half-smile, and rests his hand on Edd’s shoulder. “Now eat something, Edd.”

“How many of them were there?” asks Pyp.

“Too many to count,” Edd mutters to his soup. “They tore them all apart. The other rangers. Tore them limb from limb. Some of them had been dead a long time, and the flesh had rotted from their bodies.” He breathed deep. “We could not kill them. All we could do was run.”

***

More rangers return in the following days, this time with tidings of the living.

“Mance Rayder’s army is larger than we expected,” says Jarman Buckwell, a solid, handsome man with large hands. He sits with Bowen Marsh and Othell Yarwick in the room at the top of what is still called the King’s Tower. “And they are marching on the Wall.” He darts a quick glance at Renly – he has been doing so since he brought them their mulled wine. “Jon Snow is with them,” he continues. Bowen Marsh’s lips become a thin line in his beet red face. “They are sending out assaults all along the Wall, and we must answer them.”

“Why would they waste time attacking where they cannot cross?” Renly asks, forgetting for a moment that he is not a part of this particular war council.

“Wildlings cross the Wall often, Lord Renly,” Bowen Marsh says patiently. “Mance Rayder himself brags about how many times he has managed it.”

Renly bites his tongue before he asks, _How many times he has_ managed it? _I thought we were talking about crossing the wall._ He leaves the pitcher of wine at Bowen Marsh’s right hand.

“We should write to the four kings for assistance,” Buckwell says.

“The four kings?” Renly asks.

“What is wrong, Lord Renly?” Bowen Marsh is a patient man, Renly knows he is, but his voice sounds thin as a taught thread. “Should we write to all five?”

Jarman Buckwell laughs.

Renly pulls himself up to his full height. “Stannis will not answer a summons that does not call him the One True King, the Lannisters will mark as treasonous any who acknowledge a king other than Joffrey, and unless Balon Greyjoy’s ships can sail on land, a letter to him would be a waste of parchment,” he says. “Write to all of them, see what good it does you.”

****

The following day, Bowen Marsh begins organizing the men into companies to defend against the wildling raids. Renly cannot believe his good luck. Some of Stannis’s men, tired of guarding a kitchen boy, volunteer their services. Castle Black grows emptier by the day.

He smuggles dried meat and slices of hard cheese from the kitchen any night he can manage to. His apron knotted beneath a heavy cloak, he crosses the torchlit yard to his room on a particularly empty night. Satin is completely alone in the training yard, his crossbow drawn up before the targets. His arrow flies and trembles where it lands near to the bull’s eye.

“Good job.”

“Thank you.” Satin rests his bow at his side. “I want to be ready when the dead come knocking.”

“You think they will?” Renly asks, knowing the answer full well. This place is cold and black and empty, and whether the living or the dead arrive first, they are all doomed.

Satin shakes the snow from his curls. “No harm in practicing.”

“I never see you anymore.” The words are out before he fully understands them, and he bites his tongue. The snow falls soundlessly around them. He knows there is something he wants to say, so they stand together in the snow. “Satin, I’m sorry.” It is true, and a feeling foreign enough to Renly that at first he could not name it.

Satin smiles, beatific. “I never asked anything of you, so you never turned me away. I don’t want to chase someone who is spoken for, and really, I’ve had enough of being wanted.” He shrugs. “At least for now.” He walks to the target and collects his arrows.

“You’re lovely,” Renly says, “and I am sorry.”

“Thank you, but I don’t trust the compliments of silver-tongued politicians.”

Renly laughs out loud. The sound echoes through the yard. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he says.

“I’ll try not to, _my lord_.”

“Goodbye,” Renly murmurs beneath his breath.

Instead of walking to his room, he goes to the stables, selects the sturdiest-looking horse still left there, and leads them both out of Castle Black. He should say his goodbyes to Aemon, to Hobb, to every man there, but by now he is used to parting without goodbyes. He kicks the horse to a gallop in the direction of the King’s Road.

No one stops him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the story, Dolorous Edd. 
> 
> I feel very ambivalent about the end of this chapter right now, and I might revise it once I get a clearer sense of what I want to happen in the rest of this story.
> 
> Sorry this chapter took so long! I didn't want to write this middling bit, so I split it up into a couple of shorter chapters. I'm much more excited about what's to come!
> 
> As always, please share your thoughts, questions, and comments!
> 
> As of October 12, 2017 this chapter has been edited. I welcome any comments about the changes! I hope I've improved things.


	5. Interlude: Storm's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So what IS going on with Loras?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my love to everyone who has left comments and kudos!

Every day, Davos accompanied the king to Ser Loras’s rooms, and every day, the king received the same answer. It wasn’t always in the same words. Sometimes it was phrased as, “Bite me,” other times, “Go fuck yourself.” Tonight Loras just said, “Leave me alone.”

On all previous nights, the king had simply left, but tonight he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his crown of flames glinting in the light from the fire, making the golden tines look like they were moving. 

“I hope you realize that I am showing you mercy, Ser Loras. And that I showed Renly mercy as well.”

“Mercy has nothing to do with it,sire,” Loras said. “I simply will not fight for you.” 

Loras sat on the edge of his bed, his elbows resting on his knees, and his back bowed. Davos thought the boy looked more exhausted every night he saw him, purple circles growing around his golden eyes. His soft curls had become a matted nest about his head, and the clothes he wore were dirty, the clean ones that had been provided still sitting in a neat pile on a fine, ornate chair before the fire. "Renly would never have let himself be seen like this," Stannis had said the night before. "He would have combed his hair, dressed as finely as he could, eaten the food I sent him, and laughed in my face. He would never have let me see his pain." Davos thought that what Stannis just described sounded exactly like pain, but he said nothing. It would have made no difference.

“I will not ask again,” Stannis said.

“Good.”

“Why?”

When at last he faced them, there was murder in the boy’s bloodshot eyes. “You want to know why I will not fight for you, you treacherous coward?” He stood. “Your witch cast a spell over our camp because the only way you could ever beat us was by cheating, you sent the man I love to die at the Wall, you will tell me nothing about the war and nothing about my family, you keep me in this room like a caged animal, as if it’s any better than a prison cell!” He kicked over the chair by the fire, scattering his clean clothes. One of the chair's carved legs splintered. “As if I it makes me any less your prisoner!” 

“What do you want?” Stannis asked calmly.

“I want to go to the Wall. I want news of my family. I want to leave this miserable place!”

“I thought you would be comfortable at Storm’s End."

“It’s not the Storm’s End I know! Not with you here.”

“Would you like your old quarters? Would you like Renly’s?” 

“I would like you to leave me alone,  _Your Grace.”_ He clenched his fists at his sides and hissed through clenched teeth. " _Or is that too much to ask?_ "

Stannis stood in silence, holding Ser Loras’s gaze. Davos looked from one to the other, watching to see which one of them would break first.

“I will have you know that we did not cheat,” Stannis said. "The Lord of Light decreed that Renly would lose."

"I thought you didn’t pray to any gods,” Loras said.

Davos watched pain gather like storm clouds in his king’s eyes. At last, Stannis looked away.

“Sire,” Davos whispered. “Are you not going to tell him?"

“He's made his choice. He will be safe here.” 

“Let me join the Night’s Watch, Your Grace,” Loras said, and Stannis paused with his hand on the door. "I will not take up arms against you.” 

“Men of the Night’s Watch serve for life, Ser Loras. My brother is a vain fool. You should not throw away your life for him.” 

“Fuck you. You’re not fit to kiss his hand.” 

When Stannis turned around, Davos recognized the fury in his eyes 

“My brother is not the man you think him to be, Ser Loras. You think it was an accident that your father happened to have the largest army in the Reach? Renly never loved anyone if there wasn't something in it for him. He was courting you for - " 

The crack of knuckles against flesh split the air. The crown clattered to the ground. Stannis stood with his jaw hanging slackly open. His cheek was vivid pink where Loras had punched him.

“You know nothing about him,” Loras hissed.

The king knelt to retrieve his crown. The tines cut into his fingers and a drop of blood stained the floor when he set it on his head again. 

“Do not you refuse your meals while we are gone,” Stannis said. 

“Gone?” Loras asked. “Gone where?” 

“Goodbye, Ser Loras,” Stannis said, and Davos followed him out the door. Stannis locked it on his way out and tied the keys to his belt. 

They walked in silence towards the great hall. The men would be gathering for their final evening meal before heading north on the evening tide. The fastest path to the great hall took them past Renly’s chambers, where the king refused to set foot. 

“It makes no matter,” Stannis said, as they crossed over the battlements. “A single knight would have made no difference on the Blackwater, and he would make little difference at the Wall.”

Davos could keep the words in no longer. “Tell him where you are going, I beg you, sire.”

Stannis frowned. “You begged me to go to the Wall, and we are headed there now."

“So you should listen to me again.”

“Loras should have chosen to fight for me of his own accord. I am his rightful king, and Renly has publicly renounced his claim. I gave him chance after chance, and he struck me."

“What is the punishment for punching a king? Is it treason?”

“It might be,” Stannis said.

“You know the laws of Westeros better than I do.”

“Somehow that one was never recorded,” Stannis said, and the shadow of a smile flickered across his face.

Davos cleared his throat. “If I were captured by the Lannisters and asked to fight against you… they would not get far.” 

“We are not the Lannisters.”

“Had you considered that perhaps your brother was as kind to Ser Loras as he was cruel to you?”

“I’m his family, Davos. How can a family be so…” Stannis stopped and looked out towards the horizon.

Davos put a hand on his king’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.” 

“I thought he’d be different than Robert, I really did.”

Davos once more bit his tongue, before he said that Renly was very little like Robert at all. 

“Family is chosen as well as given to you at birth. You’re not alone. Unless you want to be.”

Stannis nodded. He said nothing, only watched as the sun set over the tossing waves.

“I will see to the ships,” Davos said and walked towards the pier. 

*

Ten minutes in, Davos nearly gave up on the lock to Ser Loras’s door. His knees were sore, his hand cramped, and he was certain a guard would turn down the hall at any moment. The door was too thick and heavy for him to talk to Loras without having to yell and attracting attention. He considered writing a note and slipping it beneath the door, but he doubted his skills. 

He gripped one of the lock picks tighter between his right thumb and the stump of his first finger and gritted his teeth. At last he heard the thunk of the lock. He stood and knocked on the door. 

“Ser Loras?” he called. 

Perhaps the boy was resting. Whether he wanted to be disturbed or not, this was Davos’s only chance. He swung the door open, and immediately doubled over in pain. Ser Loras was standing over him, holding the severed chair leg in both hands. He lifted it again, to strike Davos over the head. 

“I only want to talk with you!” Davos said, gasping. “Please.” He held up both of his hands.

Loras pulled him inside and shut the door behind them.

“What do we have to talk about?” 

"I beg you to reconsider the king’s offer,” Davos said.

Ser Loras frowned. His glowering could rival even Stannis. “Don’t waste your breath.”

“We’re headed to the Wall. That’s where we’re going. Tonight.” 

Loras’s eyes lit up like golden candle flames, and he looked even younger than his years. 

“I cannot guarantee that you will see Renly again, but there is a chance you might. I thought you should know."

“Why did Stannis not tell me?" 

“He wants you to fight for him because he is your rightful king, not for any reasons of your own.”

The boy smirked. “Now tell me again how Renly is the arrogant one.” 

“If you can bend the knee and swallow your pride, he might still take you."

"Did he send you here?”

"Does it matter?"

Loras sat on his bed again and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. 

"I must be honest with you. Renly might be dead already," Davos said. 

Loras nodded. 

The silence stretched out between them. 

When Loras finally met Davos’s eyes, the boy looked much, much older. “I will swear my sword to your king. I will fight for him at the Wall. But if Renly is dead, His Grace should start to pray."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not a Stavos fic by any means, but I could not stop them from Having A Moment. It was out of my hands. 
> 
> I also hope that I've characterized Stannis well. He's a tricky character. 
> 
> More word on Brienne later.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Renly runs away, but his plans are brought up short when he reaches Queenscrown.

He does not ride to Eastwatch, as he had planned. He takes the King’s Road south instead, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the Wall. The wind on his face is so cold it burns.

He cannot go to Eastwatch. Even if the men there believed his tale of needing to deliver a message to the Iron Bank, what are the chances they would have a ship that would survive the trip to Braavos? Considering the sad state of Castle Black, Renly imagines he would find a handful of rickety boats at Eastwatch, at the very most. He had also planned to forge a note from Bowen Marsh to the commander at Eastwatch, but he had only just managed to swipe a small bottle of ink from Maester Aemon’s rooms the night before. And he could so easily be caught before he arrives at Eastwatch, a black spot traveling at breakneck speed down the Wall. Most of all, he no longer trusts in his ability to convince people of anything he wants them to believe. Perhaps he never had such charm, and only his good looks and his high position bought him what he wanted.

Once he is far enough south to gather provisions and new clothes, he will travel east, then he will find a ship headed to the Free Cities and begin a new life as a merchant’s assistant in Myr, or one of a hundred other things. Working at the Iron Bank would be deadly dull, but Braavos, if he ends up there, has other charms.

The stars are covered with clouds, and he stays on the King’s Road until the first rays of sunrise. He leaves the main road then, taking cover in hills and trees where he can, allowing his horse to slow down at last. For the entire day, he catches no glimpse of Stannis’s guards or any black brothers, and wonders sadly if they did not consider retrieving him important. That or they think he will die out here in the elements.

He lets his horse rest when he eats - only hard cheese and harder bread. He is glad the horse can still eat the grass in this half-frozen wasteland, as he has barely brought enough to feed himself for another couple days.

By the time night begins to fall, the clouds above him have grown dark and heavy, and the air smells thick, as they do before a great storm. The last rays of thin, failing sunlight outline the tower at Queenscrown, golden merlons catching the light, a promise of shelter, and maybe even food and water. He leaves the King’s Road behind for good.

The tower at Queenscrown sits in the middle of a lake, and if Renly recalls the stories correctly, he should be able to walk there over the water that surrounds it, but he does not wish to be alone in an abandoned castle, and after all, he notices a small fire twinkling amongst a gathering of small huts. After nearly a day of hard riding, he needs to rest, and perhaps the stranger who lit the fire will not mind sharing its warmth. Either that or he will kill him.

Renly feels his eyes begin to drift closed as he approaches the shadowy town. As he gets closer, shapes grow out of the shadows, and the shapes move. He pulls on his horse’s reins, and slowly turns it back towards the King’s Road. From the corner of his eye, the shapes spring towards him. Renly drives his heels into his horse’s sides, and it rears. Renly clings to its mane, but they are surrounded now and his hands are clumsy in the cold. Hands in his cloak pull him backwards. He covers his head with his arms. When he strikes the ground, pain shoots up his temple, but he is still conscious.

“What’s a crow doing so far from his nest?” a voice says, harsh with accents of the north.

“Fetch snow,” says another from farther away. Renly touches the stickiness on his forehead. There is more of it than he thought there would be. Snow would feel cold on his brow. “Thank you,” he says absently.

“What’s that there, crow?” One of the shadows kicks at him, and he fights the urge to kick back.

“How can I help you?” Renly says as clearly as he can manage.

“Where did you come from?”

Blood drips from his head to the ground, but most of it still clings to his brow and his cheek. He cannot think of what use it would be to lie. “Castle Black,” he says. He must make a pitiful picture, but that is something he can capitalize on.

“Turn around, show us your face,” says a lilting female voice. He turns to face the wildlings in surprise as much as obedience. Lightning splits the sky. For a brief moment, all their faces are clearly illuminated. Closest to him are a bald, muscled man clad in bronze-scaled armor, and a young girl with a soft face and hair like fire. All of them swathed in furs, hair unwashed and tangled. He look like they could be the infamous northern mountain clans, but they are far from the mountains. Wildlings.

“Well,” says the girl's voice. “Why is it the pretty ones who run away?”

A wildling in the back of the group, whose face Renly cannot see, lights a torch from the small fire and holds it aloft, bathing the company in warm light.

The fiery-haired girl is smiling, but something much darker lurks in her eyes.

“They make us wear black,” Renly says. “What are we to do?”

The girl smiles again. “Jon, come here,” she says, and pulls on the arm of the man holding the torch. The boy who comes into focus cannot be more than sixteen. He has bright, darting dark eyes and something about his face reminds Renly of… _Fetch Snow._

“Snow. Jon Snow?” he says.

Ned Stark's bastard stands straighter. “How do you know my name?”

“You don’t know this crow?” the bald man asks.

“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” Jon Snow says. “He must have joined the Night’s Watch after I left.” The bastard boy cannot seem to look away from Renly’s face.

The bald wildling draws a knife.

“I don’t mean you any harm,” Renly says. “I’m running from the Night’s Watch. The girl is correct: I want to leave Westeros.”

The bald man motions with his arm, and two of the wildlings break off from the group and haul Renly to his knees, grasping his arms like iron vices.

“Could be you’re a ranger,” says another wildling. “Ready to report back about us.”

“Why would he be a spy?” Jon Snow snaps. “He couldn’t have known he’d find us here.”

The bald man’s eyes narrow. His grip on his knife tightens. “Who are you, crow?”

A lie hovers on the tip of Renly’s tongue. It might save him or condemn him. It falters. “My name is Renly Baratheon. I’m the brother of King Robert. I tried to win back his throne from the Lannisters.” He breathes deeply. “I failed.”

“You think we’ll spare your life?”

“Yes.”

“Common man or king makes no difference. You’re a crow.” He holds his knife out. “Jon?”

“You want me to kill him?” Jon Snow asks.

“You used to be a crow. You’re not anymore. Seems right.”

"I'm not a crow!" Renly says. "I was sent to the Wall by my treacherous brother, but I want no part of it, and no part of their war with you!"

"That so?" one of the other wildlings says. "Can you prove it?" 

"Prove it?" he says. "How could I prove something like that to you? What do you want me to say?" 

"Get to it, Jon," the man says. 

Jon Snow stands very still. 

“What’s wrong?” The fiery-haired girl asks him.

“Wouldn’t…” Jon hesitates. “Wouldn’t the brother of a king be more valuable as a prisoner?"

“Losing your nerve, Snow?” The woman moves closer to Jon, and one of her hands slips up inside his coat. Jon loses himself in her eyes, and Renly’s gut twists. He is going to die without ever seeing Loras again. Even if he somehow survives this and makes it to Essos alive.

“I knew your father,” Renly says.

Jon Snow’s face freezes, his jaw slack. “What?”

“I served with him on the small council. He was a good man.”

Jon Snow kneels down. “Were you there when he died? In King’s Landing.”

“I had to leave, or the queen would have killed me.”

“And you left him there?” Jon Snow’s voice is full of hurt, and Renly suddenly regrets not trying harder to save Ned Stark from himself.

“How d’you know this man is who he says he is?” the bald man asks, folding his arms over his tunic of bronze scales.

“He looks just like King Robert - how the king looked when he was younger.” He turns back to Renly. “Why?”

“Why what?” Renly’s head is still spinning, but he has gotten to this boy, and if he can hold his interest, he could still come out of this alive.

“Why did you leave him to die?”

He could lie. He should lie. He doesn’t. “I had one hundred men. That was not enough.” He could have tried to buy the city Watch, but Janos Slynt could easily have given him away to a higher bidder. “I tried to help,” Renly says. “He didn’t trust me.”

“Why?”

“Why didn’t your father trust me?” Renly asks, wondering if the boy knows any word beyond _Why_ , until he realizes that Jon is looking for a reason to spare him. He may have turned his cloak and joined the wildlings, but killing a man who would be his sworn brother, after a fashion, would turn anyone’s stomach. Maybe the boy had never killed anyone before. Renly racks his brain for something to say that will save his hide. Ned Stark had been honest, Ned Stark had been uncompromising, Ned Stark had been good. Everyone said so except Cersei Lannister, and Cersei was always wrong. And perhaps this boy has more sense than his father ever had.

“Your father was a good man, but he was not a politician, and I was asking him to trust in a political gambit. He had no reason to trust anyone in King’s Landing.”

“Well?” the bald man says to Jon. “He sounds awful. Kill him."

“Why now?" Jon asks, “I am sure he has information about Castle Black and its fortifications.”

“Haven’t you told us everything already?”

“He might know something more.”

The bald man pokes Jon’s chest. “You’re being far too kind to this deserting crow.”

“I am a deserting crow! Was. I was. Just let me ask him a few more questions.”

“A few more?”

“What’s the matter, Jon?” the red-haired girl says. “He’s not innocent. He’s a crow, and it sounds like he left you father to die."

Jon Snow draws his sword. “Better than an old man sitting by the fire,” he murmurs.

Renly has heard of men reliving their lives in the moments before their deaths, but all he can think of is the way the torchlight catches and gleams on Valyrian steel and the irony of being beheaded by Ned Stark’s bastard son.

One of the wildlings pushes him forward until his head is resting on the ground. He cannot breathe and tries to think of anything other than light on sharp steel. Only then does he notice the ground shaking beneath him.

The rumbling sound of horses’ hooves comes closer, and the wildlings holding him down shift their grip on his arms and back.

“Kill him, Jon!” the bald man yells. “Kill him now!”

Jon Snow lifts his sword and a terrible scream rends the air. The torch falls to the ground, illuminating stumbling feet and a wild blur of dark fur.

The wildlings let go of Renly, and when he stumbles to his feet, Stannis’s men are upon them. One of their swords arcs through the air and lands on the bald man’s throat. His head lolls to one side, and he topples to the ground.

Among the chaos, a dark, animal shape leaps and snarls.

A hand grasps Renly’s arm and Jon Snow cries, “Come now, please!”

Renly lets himself be pulled away from the melee, and towards where his horse is rearing, frightened. Jon grabs its reins, and pulls himself onto its back. Renly takes his offered arm, vaults onto the horse, and wraps his arms around the boy’s waist.

The cries of the wildlings charging into battle and the snarls of the dark creature fade behind them. When Renly looks back, he can see nothing but dark shapes closing in on each other. Perhaps he and Jon might just escape.

His hopes are crushed when he realizes that they are headed to the King’s Road and the Wall.

“Are you mad? Turn around!” he yells. When Jon Snow says nothing, Renly grabs the reins from his hands.

“What are you doing? We have to warn the men at Castle Black,” Jon Snow says.

“You deserted. You went over to the wildlings. Why should I trust you?” Renly says.

“I never deserted!” Jon yells. “I was given orders.”

“To spy on them?"

“Yes, and we need to get the word to Castle Black.”

“If I go back there, I will die!”

“If we don’t go there now, we all will.” Jon wrests the reins back and kicks the horse to a gallop.

“Who were those men?” the boy asks.

“I deserted,” Renly says. "They were sent after me."

“They weren’t from the Night’s Watch.”

“They are my brother’s men. He sent me to the Wall.”

“Your brother Stannis?”

“Yes.”

His brother Stannis. His brother Stannis who is now getting everything he ever wanted.

Renly wraps one arm tighter around Jon Snow, and, in a single motion, pulls him from the horse. Jon curls into a ball and rolls when he hits the ground.

“What are you doing!”

Renly slows his horse, and wheels them around, away from the Wall. “Stannis’s men will pick you up on their way north,” he says, though he is not certain of that. Why should they trust a man in wildling furs?

In a second, Jon Snow is on his feet, his hands again tangled in the reins.

“Let me go!” Renly yells.

“No! I will not let you abandon the Watch. I will not let you leave me here when I spared your life.”

“Then come with me. I’m leaving Westeros.”

“Why?”

“Why!” Renly can feel some dark and terrible greed welling up inside him. “Because I was a king! I will not die some nameless kitchen boy at Castle Black! When I was a child in Storm's End, I nearly starved to death. I can't have lived this long for nothing. All men must die. But I do not want to die here. I do not want to die forgotten.” Tears burn his cheeks. From the harsh wind, nothing more.

“If the Wall falls, Westeros falls with it.”

“I don’t care!”

“Do you mean that?” Jon Snow’s hands are grasping his own now. He has made no move to pull Renly off of the horse, and his Valyrian steel sword is still strapped to his back.

Starlight looks down on them as the clouds move aside, and it’s not enough to read Jon’s face.

“No,” Renly says. “I don’t mean it.”

“Take me to the Wall,” Jon Snow says, soft and quiet. “And I promise I will let you go.”

Renly shifts uncomfortably in the saddle. He does not want to leave this boy behind, who reminds him so much of his father. “Why should I trust you? You have no reason to trust me."

“The people of Westeros put you on a throne. They seemed to trust you well enough.”

“That’s not trust. It’s desperation. Why do you think there were five kings? The people needed something to believe in. They took whatever they were given."

Jon Snow's grip on his hands tightens. "Take me to the Wall, and I will see to it that you leave it again alive. And if I cannot do that, I will see to it that you are not forgotten."

Perhaps it is trust, or something more like desperation, but feeling the grip of Jon Snow's hands and hearing his promises, Renly offers him a hand and pulls him back onto the horse. Renly Baratheon clings to Ned Stark’s bastard as they ride north through the starlit dark. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please share your thoughts, questions, and comments!
> 
> I realize that this fic has begun to have a timeline problem. I am happy to leave it as is, but if anything about the sequence of events seems off in this chapter and onwards, I would welcome any suggestions about how to improve it.
> 
> I also hope you appreciate the self-restraint that it took for me not to have Renly say, "I don't trust nobody, and nobody trusts me."


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the author hates writing fight scenes, the Free Folk attack the Wall, and Renly plays dress-up.

“Is he visiting her? The wildling woman?”

It is only an hour or two until dawn, and this is the first time Satin has spoken to Renly since he returned to Castle Black.

Satin holds himself tall and straight as a member of the kingsguard, his crossbow resting on one of the merlons at the top of the King’s Tower. The clouds of air his breath makes are the only soft things about him.

Renly shuffles his feet and blows on his hands. When the sun comes up, his watch here will be through. “I’ve seen Jon go to the ice cells tonight,” he says, “but they might be keeping her somewhere else.”

Stannis’s men could not say how many wildlings they had killed that night at Queenscrown.

“Once we saw Lord Renly was not with them, we returned with our prisoners,” Hutton Humphrey said.

“The wildlings were part of a mission to take Castle Black by surprise and open the gate for Mance Rayder’s army,” Jon Snow said. “If they have enough men left, they may still attack.”

“How many men is enough?” Wynton Stout asked.

“I don’t know.”

The prisoners were half a dozen wildling men and the fiery-haired woman, who would not even look at Jon. Just like Satin refuses to look at Renly now.

Jon, whose word held a great deal of sway in the nearly empty castle, had insisted on double the watch every night, with as many men looking out towards the King’s Road as past the Wall. Waiting for an attack that might never come.

“Do you know what will happen to you?” Satin asks.

“If the wildlings don’t kill us all?” Renly knows he would have been better off alone on the King’s Road. He could be in Essos now, warm, dressed in any color but black, and not waiting for death to come walking up the road. Jon Snow and this collection of waning, broken men can no more stand up to desperate wildlings than silk could endure the northern cold.

“Yes,” Satin says. “What will happen to you then?”

Donal Noye’s eyes had spoken murder when Renly and Jon returned. But he was only a blacksmith and did not have the command here. Wynton Stout had nodded and listened to all of Jon’s story.

"I might not have gotten out if it weren’t for him,” Jon said, an exaggeration, but not purely a lie.

“I don’t know. They might kill me,” Renly says. “It depends who has the final say.”

Satin nods. The wind bites his smooth cheeks and nose, and his lips are so dry they look like crumpled pink muslin.

Renly does not know how long he looks out at the empty road before the sound of a horn splits the morning air. The color immediately drains from Satin’s face. Renly wants to say something, anything to comfort him, but the horn sounds again.

Beneath them, Castle Black swarms to life.

The trapdoor in the roof of the King’s Tower opens, and three men climb through it, including Jon Snow. Renly is light-headed as he descends the stairs, going through the motions he has reviewed over and over. He runs to the kitchens, picks up two kettles full of hot oil, and makes his way as carefully as he can to the metal cage leading to the top of the Wall. His sword is heavy at his side. The cage clangs shut, and ascends, packed tight with other recruits. As they reach the top, the first wildlings descend on Castle Black. Satin looses an arrow from his bow, tiny as a miniature from this distance, and it soars through empty air. Beside him, an arrow from Jon Snow strikes a wildling dead. The wildlings’ battle cry echoes off of the stones of Castle Black and the Wall itself.

The cage lurches to a halt, and Renly is pulled bodily from it by a man he cannot recognize in the darkness.

“Be careful,” he calls to the men who take the kettles from him.

Renly pulls his bow from his shoulder, and carefully begins to take his position at the top of the switchback stair. The height is thrilling, but he moves slowly in the darkness.

The men swarming below the Wall look like ants, black and grey, Westerosi and wildling looking much the same in the spotty torchlight. A handful have made it to the first steps of the stair.

“They look funny from here,” Pyp says. “Like mice.”

There are at least a dozen fallen bodies by now, arrows sticking out of them like pins in pincushions, scattered throughout the yard. On the stair, the wildlings are advancing past the first defenses, and one of them throws a black brother to the ground, right at the foot of the tower of powder kegs that Donal Noye has set next to the stair. Renly can imagine the sound of crunching bones.

“Blow the stair when as many of them are on it as possible,” Donal Noye said. “They can open the gate just as easily from below.”

Renly takes aim at the nearest wildling. The arrow whistles past his head and lands on the shoulder of a man below him, who roars in pain, but clings to the stair.

“Ever shot a longbow, milord?” Pyp says.

“At targets,” Renly says. “It’s different when they’re men.”

“They’re mice,” Pyp says. He takes aim, and his arrow flies true.

Renly begins to count the number of wildlings on the stair. It is almost comforting, a way to keep the wild battle under control in his head, until they get close enough to them that the nearest face emerges from the dark.

“Get back!” Pyp shouts. The first fiery arrow lands near to the tower of explosives, and the bottom half of the stair lights up in a conflagration of color.

Renly feels the boards of the stair shaking beneath his feet and practically pushes the man behind him back up to the Wall. He runs without thinking on steps that less than an hour ago felt hazardous to set foot on.

He feels a sudden weight catch on his right foot, and it brings him to his knees. When he kicks at it, it pulls him backwards.

He hands scrape against the rough wood of the stairs, struggling to hold on. The wildling pulls again, and Renly digs the nails of his left hand into the stair. He can feel splinters of wood sliding beneath his skin. He breathes deeply once and turns around. In a single motion, he grasps the wildling’s fur collar and plunges his sword into the man’s chest. He feels the point scrape against the man’s ribs, and watches blood bubble from his mouth into the filthy golden beard about his lips before he goes limp and falls and falls and falls. Renly watches until the man crumples beside the growing fire, his limbs bent in impossible directions. Then he is sick over the top of the switchback stair.

*

“Ever killed a man before, milord?” Pyp asks. He is kneeling next to Renly, safe on the broad expanse of the Wall. Renly cannot exactly remember climbing the last few steps of the stair, but from the wet snow seeping into his trousers, he has been sitting on top of the Wall for some time.

He wipes his hand over his mouth. A shadow falls on them, and he looks up into Jon Snow’s sleepless face. He thinks of voting in favor of the Targaryen girl’s death, of dispatching Mace Tyrell’s forces to blockade King’s Landing, of his determination to ride against Stannis in battle. 

 

“It’s good you have someone else to do your fighting for you,” Cersei once said, when Renly had invited Loras to dine in the Red Keep. Robert had been taken with him – “a boy after my own heart” – and Renly had wondered if that admiration would remain if he knew all that Renly did about this ferocious, vulnerable boy who was his dearest friend.

 

“Not with my own two hands,” Renly says. Jon and Pyp help him to his feet.

Jon Snow nods. “You’ll get used to the feeling…”

“I suppose I’m too delicate for battle,” Renly says.

“Will you walk with me?” Jon asks.

Pyp retreats, and Renly follows after Jon, shortening his strides so that he does not leave him behind. He absently realizes that he is still wearing his apron.

“Mance Rayder will be here any day now with his army,” Jon says.

“How many men does he have? Another two hundred?”

“Perhaps one hundred thousand.”

Renly forces a pleasant smile. “And why did you want to talk to me?”

“What were the odds when you went to battle with your brother?”

The smile vanishes. “You want to know how I lost?”

Jon stops. “Would it be cruel to ask?”

Renly feels the same anger that overcame him at Queenscrown bubbling up. He smiles again. “I was asleep. I have no idea what happened.”

Jon Snow’s thin, dark brows knit together. “And none of your brother’s men said anything on the road?”

Renly’s smile broadens. “It was like magic.”

Jon looks out towards the edge of the world. “And what would you do? If you had the command here?”

“But I don’t, do I?”

“Do we have a choice? The Wall must hold, or we must die trying.”

“You could try talking to him?” Renly says. “Or would that be dishonorable? Or go against your vows?”

“I’ve considered it.” Jon looks down almost demurely. The wind catches in his hair. “But he will not listen to me. Why should he? I betrayed him.”

“Is there anyone here he might speak to?”

“He might listen to a king.”

Renly’s stomach drops, and it is like stepping onto the switchback stair and looking down down down to the ground below. He thinks he knows what it would feel like to fall from this height. He knows not to feign humility and ask _A king? Where might you find one of those?_

“Do you still have the clothes you arrived in?” Jon asks.

“I threw them all away.”

“Really? The way Donal Noye speaks, it sounds like you would have had finery.”

Renly ignores the veiled, second-hand insult. “They were rags by the time we reached the Wall.” Which of the Seven could be so mischievous as to hold what he wanted so close to his grasp, to give him what he coveted as only a mummer’s farce, he does not want to know.

“What do you need me to do?” he says.

**

Renly discovers that day that real baths can be drawn at the Wall. The heat of the water in the metal tub almost burns his skin, and the soap is no better. He soaks in the staggering heat, and wonders how he used to do this almost every day in Highgarden. His hair still feels greasy after he scrubs half a dozen times. When he is finally satisfied it can get no better, he lets Clydas begin to cut it. In the next room, Jon, Maester Aemon, and Donal Noye make no effort to hide their conversation.

“How many of Stannis’s men are still here and uninjured? About fifty? Is that enough to look like a royal escort?” Jon is asking.

“I can’t imagine Mance will be happy if he sees past this farce,” Noye grumbles.

“What reason does he have to suspect anything? He knows nothing about Renly.”

“Then why not dress up anyone else? Why not Satin?”

“Mance has seen King Robert before,” Jon says, and it sounds like begging. “He’ll notice the resemblance to his brother.”

“Besides,” Maester Aemon says, “it would take time to teach a man to act like a king if he’s never been one.”

After Maester Aemon speaks, Renly can hear nothing else, and strains to listen.

“He’s not a king,” Donal Noye says, the quietest whisper, “and it may be dangerous to make him think he is one.”

“Don’t worry,” Renly calls out, and feels a shiver of delight at the silence that follows his words. “I know this is a mummer’s show, one where we might all die in the end.” He hears Donal Noye clear his throat. “If you’re done, Clydas, I’ll get dressed alone. I’d like to keep some of my dignity.”

Clydas scurries out, and Renly dries himself as best he can on the thick cloth he was given. He puts on the clothes they have laid out for him: a dark red tunic, a brown cloak and black trousers. The tunic stretches a bit at his shoulders. He wants to ask where they got the clothes, but he does not want to know the answer. For the first time wearing anything other than the black of the Night’s Watch, he feels naked without his armor. Not the green and gold plate, but layers of silk and embroidery, all carefully chosen, a shield against the dirt and ugliness of the world. He had felt immortal. Wearing this, he feels shabby and fake, and knows that everyone can see it.

 

“Mance is going to see through this,” Renly says, joining them in Maester Aemon’s study.

“Clothes not fine enough for you for you?” Noye asks.

Jon glances nervously between the two of them. “Red matches the sigil. We couldn’t find anything yellow or gold.”

“The sigil? You mean Stannis’s sigil? The flaming heart?”

“It’s yours now,” Maester Aemon says.

Noye leaves them without further acknowledgement.

Renly rubs at the rough hair on his cheeks. “Is there a razor?”

“The beard makes you look like Robert. You should keep it,” Jon Snow says, before following Donal Noye.

There must be a razor somewhere here. Maester Aemon himself goes clean-shaven, and Renly knows he will find one if he looks. He opens the drawer of a small cabinet, and finds only ink and paper.

“Will you sit with me?” Aemon asks.

The old man has his hands folded delicately on his lap. His pale eyes gaze forward.

Renly supposes he can find a razor before Mance Rayder comes. He sits down next to Aemon.

Something about Maester Aemon makes him feel half a child. It’s not that he reminds him of Maester Cressen. Aemon has a quiet dignity about him that he never remembered from the maester of his childhood. And he is nothing like Penrose, strong and brash, clapping Renly on the back and saying, _Try your best, and if they still don’t like you, then fuck ‘em._

“Do you think we stand a chance?” he asks, almost without thinking.

Aemon smiles. “Of course I do. It was my idea.”

“I mean, I do look like Robert, and if that’s enough to scare Mance Rayder – but I don’t see why it would be.”

“I was hoping you would do more than scare him. I was hoping you might talk to him.”

Renly has never had any trouble seeing greatness in himself. It requires little imagination to make any man into a hero, especially yourself. Since a child, he had imagined so many lives, he saw no reason why kingship should not be among them.

But now his breath catches and he shakes his head. “You can’t expect me to negotiate a peace with the wildlings.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t… no one can talk to them. What they want is impossible.”

“It’s been a long time since anyone has tried.”

“I’m not a king. I never was. Please tell Jon.”

“Didn’t you want to be?”

“I wanted it more than words could say.” He lowers his voice. “I think I still do.”

Aemon hears him. “Good.”

“Stannis never wanted it,” he finds himself saying. “He just wanted to do his duty to the realm.”

Maester Aemon’s placid face furrows in confusion. “Then why did he oppose you?”

Renly laughs. “I don’t know. You ought to ask him.”

“Every man has a choice. He did then, and you do now.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

Aemon reaches across to Renly, who takes his hand. “You chose to stay here. And I am glad you did, because I believe there is a great deal here for you to do.”

***

Mance Rayder’s army extends as far as the eye can see. And with them, men standing taller than the trees. Others at the helms of chariots pulled by wild beasts. Giants. Wargs. Monsters. Creatures from Penrose’s tales come to life.

“You only need to delay them,” Jon says. “Long enough for the men from Eastwatch and the Shadow Tower to arrive.”

Renly wonders if Jon is trying to comfort him because he heard about his embarrassing conversation with Maester Aemon.

“Don’t worry.” Renly runs a hand through his hair. “The people of Westeros listened to me. They loved me,” he says, as if saying so will make it absolutely true. “There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be the same here.”

“The Free Folk are not the people of Westeros,” Jon says. “They follow their own laws, and they will not feel any loyalty that you do not earn.”

“How would I earn it?”

“Mance became king by defeating his rivals in battle.”

“But that’s not the plan, is it?”

Jon shakes his head, and they both walk to the cage. “Listen to him. Don’t act like you are above him in any way. In his eyes, you’re not.”

At the bottom of the Wall, Ser Brandon Storm carries a white banner atop a white horse.

While many of Stannis’s men had sat in sullen silence as Jon Snow explained the plan and their role in it, and Mark Morrigen had even muttered “treason,” Ser Brandon had stood up before them all.

“We don’t know if we will ever see King Stannis again,” Brandon said. “Would he want us to sit here like sullen maidens or do what we can to defend the realm? I would like to be the first beyond the Wall.” The other men sat forward, attentive if not agreeable. “Besides, now we all know his brother’s not so bad.”

Renly imagines it as a rallying cry: “Not so bad! Not so bad!”

Brandon grins at him from atop his white horse. “Your Grace.”

“Save it for beyond the Wall, Brandon,” Renly says, smiling, and reaches out to pat the horse’s neck. “Good luck.”

The gate slowly creaks open and Brandon slowly walks his horse beneath feet and feet of solid ice.

When the grate falls into place, the men gathered all press their ears close to it, breath baited and waiting for the sound of battle, ready to spring into position.

At the sound of Brandon’s voice, Renly joins them. The sound comes to them as barely in echo.

“His Grace King Renly Baratheon of the Seven Kingdoms, the First of His Name,” Ser Brandon proclaims, “requests a parlay with Mance Rayder, King of the Free Folk.”

A deadly silence follows, in which Renly imagines all the ways the wildlings could kill Ser Brandon. They could behead him, they could shoot him with a longbow, they could smash his head in with a warhammer, stab him with a spear, spill his guts with a longsword… they could do a lot with a sword: slit his throat, stab him in the heart or through the eye…

“Can this king not cross the Wall himself?” says a commanding voice, a wildling.

“How can we be assured no harm will come to him?” Brandon asks. “You cannot move this entire army.”

“Does your king lack his balls, kneeler? Let him show himself and Mance Rayder will agree to a parlay.”

Stannis’s men are already ready and waiting. Jon hands Renly the reins of their finest horse. Renly thinks again of all the ways man can die in battle.

He swings onto the horse in one smooth motion, feeling sweat gather on the nape of his neck, beneath his arms, and behind his knees. “At least I will die a king,” he mutters.

He had said the same to Loras, on the eve of their battle with Stannis.

“Don’t say that,” Loras had hissed at him, pressing a leg between his thighs and pushing him back on his bed.

“I said if, Loras. If,” he said with a laugh and pulled Loras close. “We all die. But if we’re lucky, we do it well.”

The kiss that Loras gave him turned his limbs to water and set fire burning in his veins. “Yes, you’ll die in greatness. We both will.” Loras’s breath was warm and soft on his cheek. “But not today.”

“Renly?” Donal Noye calls. He shoves a metal circlet towards him, holding it with all the ceremony of holding up an iron kettle or a broken, particularly troublesome bit of armor. “A King must have a crown.”

The circle of metal is smooth and heavy in Renly’s hands. The colors shift beneath his gaze, as if Noye had forged it from various pieces of discarded metal he found in his forge. He probably did. Yet the effect is striking, and it gleams in what little sunlight has filtered through the clouds. When Renly looks up to thank him, the man is gone. Before him, the gate slowly opens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time... Gonna get PUMPED. Gonna do some DIPLOMACY.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has followed this story! Your comments are inspiring, and I cherish each and every one. 
> 
> If you enjoy this story, I would encourage you to check out "Brother, It's Cold Outside" by Netgirl_y2k, and its companion piece "Black Horns, White Snow" by prodigy. They both explore an AU where all three Baratheons are sent to the Wall. 
> 
> In the former story, there's a little detail that Renly kills a "wildling he'd sent tumbling to his grave by slashing at the man's face the instant he'd topped the wall." I had already written the first draft of this chapter before discovering that story, and was way too excited that another author, independently of me, decided that in the Battle of Castle Black, Renly dramatically stabs someone at the very edge of the Wall, sending them to a death hundreds of feet below. It must be something about his character.
> 
> I have also edited Chapter Four to give it a slightly different ending. It shouldn't affect the story going forward, but if you are curious, I would love to know your thoughts on the changes!


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one is long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I remember thinking when this story was only going to be eight chapters long... (sighs) ...

Mance Rayder’s army, so imposing from a distance, sends chills down Renly’s spine when the Wall no longer stands between them. Up close, he can see slaver dripping from jaws of the dogs on their chariots and can look up and up at giants carrying tree trunks for clubs.

The wildlings are raising a tent in the center of the wide, treeless field between the forest and the Wall. Behind them, the soldiers on the first line of attack have begun to set down their arms, some more willingly than others.

“Fuck this!” one of them shouts, and the man next to him claps a hand on his shoulder and says something that makes him laugh. The other man, who must be Mance Rayder, begins to walk across the empty field. The King Beyond the Wall wears no crown, and he does not need one. Mance Rayder is perhaps the most ordinary-looking man that Renly has ever seen, and surprisingly small, but there is no mistaking that he is a king. He wears no crown, only a tattered red and black cloak over his ordinary clothes. Something about the way he carries himself, the ease of it, unarmed in front of his army, is unmistakably royal. He smiles at Renly as he dismounts. A broad, genuine smile, the like of which Renly never saw at King’s Landing.

“You must be Robert Baratheon’s brother?” Mance Rayder says.

Renly bites his lip. Not so unlike King’s Landing. “I am.”

“I did not think to meet you when I marched south.” Mance gestures at the fifty riders lined up behind Renly. “Are these your men?”

“Not all of them,” Renly lies.

Mance turns towards where his men have finished pitching their tent, large and made of animal hides. “I was hoping we could speak in private,” he says.

The inside of the tent is more richly furnished than Renly expected, inasmuch as he expected nothing but the frost-scorched ground. The ground is covered with furs, with a pile of cushions on one corner. Facing them, a giant black horn, taller than Renly himself, carved with what look like ancient runes and girded in gold, lies cradled in fur. The wildlings must be possessed of far more wealth than Mance Rayder’s appearance suggests. Renly feels very plain and wishes he had his old things about him now. They made him feel safe.

“It’s cold,” Mance Rayder says. “I could light a fire for us.”

How easy it would be for Mance to go from lighting a fire to setting the tent ablaze with Renly caught inside.

“That’s not necessary,” Renly says, watching his breath make clouds in the air.

The King Beyond the Wall fights back a smile. “Please sit,” he says. “You as well,” he says to Brandon and Hutton, standing just inside the tent.

“We are members of His Grace’s kingsguard,” Brandon says, “And we are not here to rest.”

A chill runs down Renly’s spine. None of this is real, but for a moment, it feels like it is, and that is enough.

When Mance Rayder looks back, Renly only smiles. Mance sits on the cushions opposite him. “You’re right to be careful, you’re on enemy soil.”

“I hope not,” Renly says. “Which is why I am here.”

“You hope this is not enemy soil? Are you saying that you are my friend, King Renly?”

“I am saying that I hope to be.”

Mance Rayder settles back against the pillows, seemingly at ease, but every muscle in his body is alert, wary. “May I ask how you hope to achieve that?”

“By negotiating an arrangement that is satisfying to everyone involved.”

“And what is it that you want?”

“To defend my realm,” Renly says. “I was summoned to the Wall when Castle Black heard you were marching south.”

“And you left your throne behind? Unguarded?”

“I left King’s Landing to negotiate a peace, and my throne is not unguarded.”

“King Renly…” Mance Rayder says. “My people will cross the Wall, or we will die trying. What terms are you willing to offer us?”

“I am willing to discuss such terms, if you can guarantee me a peace.”

“Your people are the ones who have been murdering mine, and driving us above the Wall, century after century.”

“But this is about your army and mine, here today.”

Mance smiles at him ruefully. “Of course. What do centuries of history matter?”

Renly notices the change in Mance’s body. He is taking up more space, in an almost protective manner. He decides to tell Mance what he wants to hear.

“Of course they matter. But I have a duty to my people.” Renly nearly shudders at that, he sounds so much like Stannis. Such empty words. “If I should open the gate at Castle Black, and violence follows, I am responsible. Westeros just concluded a long and bloody war. I can’t let another one follow in its footsteps.”

“A war?” Mance asks.

Renly forces himself to relax, lays one wrist on his knee. He reviews the story that he imagined with Jon and Maester Aemon. “After my eldest brother died, the Lannisters put a false king on the throne – Queen Cersei’s bastard. The north rebelled, but joined with me after I defeated my other brother, Stannis.”

Mance smiles at him, and it’s part challenge, part mere amusement. “Isn’t that treason? To execute your elder brother to take the throne?”

“Yes,” Renly says. “Stannis would have been a terrible king, and we met fairly on the field of battle.”

Mance’s smile grows. “Perhaps I misjudged you.”

Renly does not want to know what he means. “I will do anything to protect my people.”

“As I will do anything to protect mine.”

Mance meets Renly’s eyes and Renly holds his gaze, already deciding that he is going to break away first, let Mance feel in control. “Perhaps a fire would be nice,” he says.

Mance calls out to his men, and three wildlings come in with wood, rocks, kindling, and a torch. They clear a space on the floor, and Mance arranges the fire himself, colors dancing on his smooth face.

“Where would your people most like to settle?” Renly asks, once Mance has sat across from him once again. “Here in the North? Or would you prefer the Reach? Dorne?”

“None of that will be necessary,” Mance Rayder says, and it seems the tent has grown shadows, with the now raging fire at its center.

“So the North…”

Mance says nothing.

“Any particular part?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Your people should have a say in their future… and I will have to send a raven to Robb Stark to negotiate with him.”

“If there is a King in the North, why did he not come here himself?”

Renly focuses on keeping his breathing even and measured. He could have made himself king of all Westeros in this fantasy, but he was unsure how much Mance Rayder knew about the war. He reminds himself calmly of the suggestion Jon Snow had made for why this made sense.

“Robb Stark is landlocked, still fighting the last Lannister forces. I was at King’s Landing when the raven from the Watch reached me, and could easily sail to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.”

Mance narrows his grey eyes. Renly can’t help but feel affronted. He has always been an excellent liar.

“So another man is fighting your war for you?”

“Our war,” Renly says, fighting back memories of proud Catelyn Stark, looking down her long nose at his tourney. _Playing at war._ “My forces had taken King’s Landing a week before I came here. I almost hesitated to come altogether: the people need a figure of calm and certainty in these times. But my wife, Margaery, is even better loved than I am, so she is keeping spirits high while I am gone.”

He wonders what Margaery is doing now. She might very well be cheering the smallfolk in King’s Landing, just as she had cheered the entire Reach. If he had brought her with him to Storm’s End, could she have even cheered poor old Stannis?

“My wife and I are expecting a child,” Mance Rayder says unexpectedly. “She is here with the army, and I would have brought her here to meet you, but your appearance was unexpected.” Mance smiles to himself.

“Are you hoping for a son? An heir?”

“A king is chosen amongst the Free Folk on his merit. The title does not pass from father to son, even if I wanted it to. Which is as it should be. Blood is no guarantee of good leadership.”

“I hope the child is healthy, boy or girl,” Renly says. They are far afield of the topic he intended, and Renly wonders if he can direct them even further away. The more Mance trusts him, the more time they talk, the better. Sooner or later, he will realize that Renly’s promises are written on melting ice.

“Do you have any other children?”

“No, do you?”

“No, unfortunately.”

“What do you intend to say to Robb Stark,” says Mance, redirecting the conversation in a way that Renly cannot fight.

Renly clears his throat. “What would you like me to tell him?”

“Tat my people will not be ruled by one of your kings, even the King in the North, though we are more than willing to make a peace with him.”

“Then perhaps we should discuss possible transport south? After all,” Renly leans forward and watches Mance intently, “winter is coming, and when it does, the North may not be habitable. There will be snow even in the Reach. That is why you are marching south, is it not?”

“Your Grace,” Mance’s voice is little more than a whisper, and Renly strains to hear. “I don’t think you comprehend what winter means for my people.” His voice cannot hide his disdain. “You have never been beyond the Wall.”

“What’s beyond the Wall?” Renly asks, all innocence. “Besides the cold?”

One of the branches on the fire snaps and collapses in a minor avalanche of spark and ash.

“Dangers you cannot imagine.” Mance’s gaze drifts to the horn.

“It’s a beautiful horn,” Renly says “I’m sure it sounds as magnificent as it looks.”

“It is said that the man who sounds it can bring down the Wall.”

Renly feels the color draining from his face, even as he assures himself that such a thing is impossible.

“I hope that we can come to a deal, King Renly Baratheon. Because if we cannot, I will do what must be done.”

*

“He’s bluffing,” Ser Brandon Storm reassures Renly, and the few other men who are gathered in the common hall the following morning. “We bluffed, he bluffed harder.”

“What if he’s not?” Renly says. “If what we offer him is not good enough… I need to go back out there. Now.”

“That’s none of your concern,” Donal Noye says. “You aren’t making the decision. We are.”

“Jon?” Renly asks. Jon Snow has not said a word since Renly and his men crossed the Wall with news the day before. He looks like a ghost.

“She told me they didn’t find it,” he whispers. “Ygritte told me.”

“Maybe she was told to lie,” Renly says.

“Or maybe she didn’t know,” says Maester Aemon.

“I can talk him out of using it.” Renly says, “that he is condemning his own people along with our own.”

“That would be a lot riding on you getting it right,” Donal Noye says.

“I thought that’s what we planned.”

“Not that much.”

“Whatever we do, we’re marking time,” Jon Snow says.

“There’s nothing wrong with marking time.” Renly says.

“Weren’t you doing that on the Rose Road?” says Donal Noye.

“And I was winning the war. If this… mythical horn is Mance Rayder’s best hope, if he’s even thinking of using it, he knows, he must know the difficulties he’s facing. Yes, he was making a threat, but he was also revealing his own weakness.”

“A supernatural weapon is a weakness?” Donal Noye sits back in his chair.

“Mance already has an army,” Renly says. “He already has giants on his side. Why is that not enough?”

“I don’t think he would have said anything if you didn’t parlay with him,” Noye grumbles.

And then everyone speaks at once.

“Oh, so now it’s my fault?” Renly says, and Donal Noye says, “No, you idiot!” and Aemon says “I don’t think that’s necessary,” and Brandon says, “So we destroy it, no problem!"

“Stop!” Jon shouts. He stands up, hands planted firmly on the table. He looks at each of them in turn. “Ser Brandon, go to the gate. Inform Mance Rayder that a raven has been sent to Robb Stark, and that King Renly will meet with him and continue to discuss terms whenever he wishes. Renly, write to my brother at Riverrrun. This plan might work if there is at least some truth to it. Donal Noye - ” Then he hesitates. In these moment, it is easy to forget that Jon Snow is a boy. His cheeks are still nearly smooth, and he may be six-and-ten, but he is the youngest sitting at this table. He clears his throat and picks his hands up from the table, awkwardly folds them behind his back. “What do you think we should do?”

“I think we should prepare for battle,” Donal Noye says. “We’ll show as little as possible of our hand, but without the switchback stair, we can only get men to the top of the Wall so fast.” He sighs. “Someone should talk to the wildling prisoners, if they are willing to speak. Not Jon,” he says. “And not Renly. They know who they are.”

“Then who would you suggest?” asks Maester Aemon. “They will not trust any black brother more than Jon.”

“Ask my men,” Brandon says.

They disperse to their tasks, Renly and Maester Aemon to the rookery, Jon to speak to Stannis’s men, Donal Noye to the recruits, and Brandon Storm once again to send a message across the Wall.

Renly cannot concentrate on the parchment in front of him, words blurring together. He had intended to make a deal with the King in the North since before Catelyn Stark had set foot in his camp. Her sympathy for Stannis had shaken his resolve, but had not changed his mind… but writing to Robb Stark now feels so empty and meaningless.

“You’re not writing as yourself.” Maester Aemon seems to sense Renly’s unease from across the room. “I will dictate.”

Renly nods. “Thank you.” He allows his hands to follow Maester Aemon’s words, focusing only on the styling of his letters, not on their substance.

“Sign it ‘ _Maester Aemon_ ,’” the maester concludes. “Should this fall into Lannister hands, that should tell them that it comes from the Watch, instead of using your name and losing any hope for their help.”

Renly signs Maester Aemon’s name. “May I ask you something?” he says.

“Yes?”

“Do you think I can talk Mance Rayder out of using the horn? If it’s even real?”

“Yes, I do,” Maester Aemon says. “Why do you ask? Losing faith in yourself?”

“I’m not doubting myself. It’s just that we have very few options.”

“Other than war, we have no other options.”

The fire crackles as the ink on the parchment dries.

“If the horn were destroyed…” he whispers, “if Mance Rayder were to die…” He says it more to himself, but Maester Aemon hears.

“A politician’s answer, and not a kind one.”

“You’ve thought of it?”

“Do you think Mance Rayder deserves to die?”

Renly looks across the room at the small, quiet man sitting so close to the fire. “No one deserves to die,” he says.

“And…?”

“And I’ll talk to Mance Rayder. And all will be well.”

**

They wait all day, and they wait into the night, and still no message from the wildlings or their king.

Renly finally gives up trying to sleep around midnight and joins the men atop the Wall. The stars are bright in a moonless sky, cold, haughty lights that illuminate nothing.

“Your Grace,” calls Brandon Storm when Renly emerges from the cage.

“See anything, Ser Brandon?” he asks as he walks to where the knight stands with Mark Morrigan.

“Nothing but their nightfires,” Brandon says.

“I suppose that’s good.”

Morrigan grunts and pushes past Renly on his way to the cage.

“Doesn’t like me, does he?” Renly asks. “It’s fine – I’m used to it.”

He and Brandon look out over the wildling camp, a city of small fires dissolving into the trees. Renly can pick out where a giant has nestled down for the night.

“How much control do you think Mance has?” Renly asks. “If he tells them all to wait, will they wait?”

They have the Wall on their side, but the wildling army is so large, the gate at Castle Black may not hold, should the fighting start again.

“Did you have control of your army? Did Stannis have control over his? They’re wildlings, but Mance Rayder united them. They must have some discipline.”

“Of course,” Renly drifts into silence again. “How did you come to serve my brother?”

“Why d’ya ask?”

“Curious.”

Brandon sighs a giant white cloud in front of him. “I was a hedge knight when the war started. I thought King Stannis the best candidate. He knighted me when he saw my skill.”

“You must owe him a great deal.”

“He does the right thing,” Brandon says, as if that settles the matter. “And you’re his family, so you must share some of that with him.”

Renly wants to laugh, but he can’t find the least bit of amusement in Brandon’s words. “Thank you for saying that.”

“Still worried about that giant horn?”

“Just to be clear, if they bring down the Wall, I’m changing sides.”

“It’s probably just a pretty-looking fake. Nothing to be afraid of,” Brandon says and smiles. “Just like you.”

“It’s done the trick, whether it’s real or not.” Renly finds his eye drawn to a particularly large campfire. “What people see is important. Stannis never understood that. Sometimes… it’s more important than the truth.”

Brandon coughs nervously. “I shouldn’t have said anything – I was trying to joke.”

“I take it as a compliment. We fake things get to be prettier than anything real, after all.”

***

Another two days go by.

“What is Mance Rayder doing?” asks Wynton Stout.

They are seated around the head table in the common hall, what has become their daily war council following breakfast.

“He’s thinking,” Jon says.

“Testing us,” says Donal Noye.

“Waiting to see how we react,” says Maester Aemon.

“As frustrating as it may be,” Jon continues, “the longer he spends waiting, the better off we are.” The boy rubs nervously at the long scars across his cheek. “He’s doing this to intimidate us – letting us know about his terrible weapon and just… waiting.”

“Is he waiting for us to surrender?” Renly asks.

“He knows we won’t surrender – he has to know that much! But he might be waiting for you to concede to his demands.”

“But we can’t do that, even if we wanted to.”

“So this whole lie about Renly was useless?” Donal Noye says.

“Not necessarily,” says Jon.

Renly takes a deep breath. “I could still – ”

“Talk him out of using the horn?” says Donal Noye.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“It’s our best option, but we may not be given a chance.” Maester Aemon speaks with matter-of-fact authority. “We should be ready to talk again if Mance allows it, ready to fight if he does not.”

****

When Renly wakes out of a deep sleep that night, it’s to a loud knock at his door that only part of him hears. He dreamt of battle that night, but he was standing in the center of it all, weighted down by chains. The shock of being able to move his limbs at last startles him so much that the knock seems but an echo of a dream he can’t shake off.

When it continues, he staggers to the door, and opens it, without thinking who might want him at this hour.

Satin stands on the other side. He holds a torch in one hand, illuminating his fair face. “The men from Eastwatch have arrived, and the battle’s begun,” Satin says, as if reciting from a script.

Renly rubs his face and starts to root about in the shadows for his sword, bow, and quiver. By the time he has found them, Satin is gone.

Before heading to the cage, and the top of the Wall, he drops in on the kitchens to see Hobb. Perhaps out of concern, perhaps out of terror at the thought of that wildling army finally on the move.

“Renly!” the cook yells when Hobb sees him. “Take this to the Lord Commander’s Tower. Everyone’s bloody abandoned me, and I’ve only got two hands.”

Renly swings his bow and quiver over one shoulder, and balances the trays that Hobb gives him, one on each hand. The men in the yard make way for him, mostly, some too focused on the imminent battle to see ahead of their own noses.

The line to the cage is growing, and Renly wonders if any of them will return to the earth without its help.

The guards outside the Lord Commander’s Tower, men he does not recognize, open the door wide for him. He kicks the melting snow off his boots before ascending the stair. Voices drift down to him through the dark spiral stair, Maester Aemon and Wynton Stout and drunken Septon Cellador, and others strange and strangely familiar.

When he reaches the door to the solar, he knocks with one foot. The man who opens it is a stranger to him. Two men are talking at the Lord Commander’s desk, one of them seated, his face turned away, the other, a thin man with long, graying hair and black, humorless eyes.

“Food!” Septon Cellador cries. “At last!”

The thin stranger looks up and so does the man he is speaking to, Janos Slynt.

Renly freezes, his jaw slack, trying to think of how best to greet this man who had once almost been his ally. Once. Almost. A lifetime ago. Renly blinks the sleep from his eyes, and has finally decided how to best make him laugh, when Janos Slynt doubles over in laughter of his own accord and points a finger like a fat sausage at him.

“I can’t… I can’t be seeing this! King Robert’s little brother.” He slams a hand down on the table. “What would the smallfolk think of their king now?”

Soft chuckles echo Janos’s bawdy laughter. He leans in closer to the thin, sour-looking man next to him. “I never saw Lord Renly Baratheon go anywhere without gold and jewels on his fingers or wear anything but the finest, softest clothes. But the Wall humbles every man, doesn’t it?” He grins. “Doesn’t it, Renly?”

Renly considers dropping the trays of food on the floor. Instead he holds one of them out to Septon Cellador. “It’s for you, I’m not standing here looking handsome for nothing.”

The men chuckle again. Septon Cellador grabs one tray, and another man sets the second on the desk.

“Renly has been negotiating with Mance Rayder,” Maester Aemon says. “He bought us time so that we could wait for you.”

“Bought you time?” says the thin man and looks Renly up and down. “Dressing in a costume to avoid battle. Castle Black has gone to the dogs since I left.”

“Well I’m sorry you didn’t come sooner,” Renly says, “then we'd be dead already.”

Janos Slynt slams his fist on the desk, harder this time. “That is not how you address your superior officer, kitchen boy.”

“I didn’t know he was my superior officer. You didn’t introduce us.”

“My name is Ser Alliser Thorne, young man. And you will address me as such.”

“Ser Alliser,” Renly says and smiles. “Am I free to go?”

Janos Slynt waves a dismissive hand as Ser Alliser Thorne continues staring Renly down until he closes the door behind him.

*****

Renly spends the battle running from the kitchens to the top of the Wall to his position at the gate – safe from the worst of the battle, until the wildlings should breach it – to the common hall to the Lord Commander’s Tower. The days blur together, fiery arrows lighting up the night, the cries of dying men a cloud over the days.

One strangely quiet morning, three or four or five days in, he could not say, somewhere between sleep and waking, he sets foot in the Lord Commander’s Tower, only to find Janos Slynt there alone.

“Renly! Will you sit with me?”

Renly stops in the doorway. Janos Slynt is smiling, his arms opened wide. “Is something wrong, Lord Slynt?” Janos insisted on being called by his title, Lord of Harranhal that he is.

“Nothing is wrong! Can I not greet an old friend?” Janos pulls another chair close to the desk. “You must understand that Alliser Thorne is a harsh, cruel man, and that I had to go along with his wishes. When he first heard that you were here, he was delighted that a king had fallen so low.” He takes the tray of food and ale from Renly’s hands and sets it on the desk. “So I had to play along, you understand?”

It is the cheapest mummers’ show that Renly has ever seen. He walks towards the offered chair. “I understand – you’re just playing the game.”

“I learned from the best.”

Renly lets Janos pour him ale and pretends to listen intently as he regales him with the tale of how he came to the Wall. But the tale is self-aggrandizing and tedious, and along the way, Renly recalls the red fury on Stannis’s face when he chose to let Janos keep his job, after he was appointed as Master of Laws.

“He’s not trustworthy,” Stannis said.

Renly shrugged. “He’s a rat. But there are places in King’s Landing only rats can go – small, slippery spaces.”

Stannis’s frown had deepened. “What are you talking about? Slynt is a man, just like you and me.”

“But he’s not a man like you and me,” Renly had said. “We are stags, like Cersei is a lion and Mace is a fat flower. We all have our parts to perform. Unless you’d rather be something other than a stag.”

“Some days I’d rather be anything else.”

When Renly rejoins the conversation, Janos Slynt is still busily listing everything Tyrion Lannister has ever done wrong in his life. Renly finds himself dangerously close to yawning.

“And another thing about the Imp!” Janos is yelling now. “He carries himself like he’s the most important man in Westeros! He takes his sweet, slow time wherever he goes…” Janos playfully punches Renly’s arm. “He’s not like you. You can take a joke.”

“Can Alliser Thorne?” Renly asks and leans back in his chair, curious how far he can push Slynt’s nonexistent loyalties.

Slynt snorts. “The man has a stick shoved so far up his ass I don’t know how he can still walk.”

“You should say that to the new recruits. I think they’d appreciate it.”

Janos snorts. “We’re not all you, Renly. We can’t all always say what’s on our minds without thinking.”

“Why isn’t Alliser here? Out fighting?”

“Fighting? You haven’t heard? Mance Rayder waved the white flag!”

“We won? Why wouldn’t you lead off with that?” Renly smiles. “Let me pour you another drink.”

“Mance knew he couldn’t stand up to me,” Janos says, chuckling to himself.

“I’m sure that’s the reason,” Renly says, pouring them both more ale.

“He’s requested a parlay with King Renly. You’re going to save us all!”

“That’s very kind of you, but what will I say? He wants to cross the Wall with his people, and I am in no position to offer him anything. I mean, I suppose we could – ”

“You’re not going to talk to him!” Janos exclaims. “You’re going to kill him.”

The ale spills. Renly had the same idea at the start of all of this, but hearing it delivered to him as a direct order… the breath leaves his body.

“You won’t have to do it yourself, of course. We’ll send you in the guise of ‘talking about peace’ and one of your kingsguard can cut his savage head off!”

Renly feels ill, and for once, speaks his mind without thinking. “He’s not crossing the Wall to conquer Westeros! He’s protecting his people. If he agrees to kneel – ”

“You’ve been spending time with Lord Snow.” Janos purses his mouth as he speaks, a mockery of Jon's name.

“Where is he?”

“The ice cells. He’s a wildling and a traitor. Turned his cloak at the first opportunity.”

“As much as I would love to kill Mance Rayder,” Renly says, sickly sweet. “It’s a suicide mission.”

“Looking out for your own skin. I always knew I liked you, Renly!” Janos grins and Renly feels even sicker. “We’ll triple your kingsguard, even put them in rainbow cloaks. You’ll be fine.”

“The wildlings outnumber us. Even if you sent every single man here beyond the Wall, they could crush us. They would crush me for certain, the second it turns out we’ve betrayed them.”

Janos looks hurt. “You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t trust the wildlings!”

“Then we’ll make Mance come here!”

“He won’t listen, and he’ll still have the Horn of Winter.”

“A magic toy? I'm supposed to fear that!” Janos spears a sausage on his knife. “Wildlings are all craven, Renly. They’ll run when their leader is down but if you don’t want to… I’ll send in Lord Snow.”

“You'll send in the traitor?” Renly says, realizing what he must do. “Jon Snow is half a wildling. He’ll never get the job done.” He stands, towering over Janos Slynt. “Give me all the men I need, and it’ll be done right.”

Janos Slynt shakes his hand.

******

Renly’s men are assembled at the gates by the time he joins them, along with fifty chosen by Janos Slynt. He is not freshly bathed, and his tunic somehow acquired a stain, but as a king he had determined to fight his own battles and does not see why it would have been different here.

He dons his crown, mounts up, and turns his horse around to face them all.

“We’re off to kill him, Your Grace?” asks Brandon Storm, steely-eyed.

“If I draw, you draw,” Renly calls out, loud enough for all the men to hear. Then he leans close to Brandon, whispering, “And if I don’t…”

Brandon inclines his head slightly, and his face is suddenly more at ease.

They march through the gates, fifty in front of Renly, fifty behind.

The stench of death hangs in the air beyond the Wall. Buzzards circle above the decomposing corpse of a giant, in a sky obscenely blue.

“King Renly?”

Renly looks down to see a monstrously muscular wildling, with a bushy white beard, his scarred arms banded in gold.

“You here to see Mance Rader?” the man asks.

“Yes.”

“Follow me.”

Throughout the camp, the wildlings are gathering to burn their dead. The smell of burning flesh overtakes the smell of death as the wildling leads them deeper and deeper into the camp. Every step they take, cold eyes look up at Renly, bitter words on their tongues that Renly does not know, but perfectly understands.

One of them speaks in the common tongue, a woman who yells at him. “Go fuck yourself, southron coward!”

When they reach Mance Rayder’s tent, the tall wildling goes in alone. When he returns, he holds the tent flap open. “Only the king.”

“The King of the Seven Kingdoms goes nowhere without his kingsguard,” Hutton Humphrey says.

“Mance Rayder’s wife is in that tent,” the tall wildling says. “And she is close to giving birth to his child.”

“No harm will come to her,” Renly says. “You have my word.”

Teeth emerge within the man’s white beard. “Just like you gave Mance your word that you would not attack until he had an answer for you?”

Renly’s horse shifts beneath him. “If the King Beyond the Wall allows me to enter his tent along with my kingsguard, he will be given a full explanation.”

The wildling’s teeth disappear.

“Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?” Renly says, as much promise and charm in his voice as he can afford.

Mance’s voice emerges from the tent. “Let him and his men in, Tormund. They won’t dare spill blood in here. Not today.”

The wildling named Tormund holds the cloth to one side, and three of Renly’s men step inside. Renly feels the pressure of the long knife hidden inside his boot as he dismounts. He makes a show of unbuckling his swordbelt, a show that pleases Tormund.

Brandon and Hutton follow him into the tent, the final two of those who had volunteered to be his Seven standing sentry outside the door.

The same pile of pillows is by the opening of the tent, now occupied by a woman lying on her back, one hand spread over her round belly. Another woman kneels by her side, mopping her brow with wet linen.

“I hope you don’t mind that my wife is here,” Mance Rayder says. “This is all the comfort I can provide her.”

“Of course,” Renly says.

Next to them, the Horn of Winter lies spread out on its bed of furs.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Mance said. “That’s what you said when you first saw it.”

“I did.”

“Nothing else to say?”

“You called this parlay, so you should begin.”

“Let my men through the gate today, or I bring down the Wall.”

Renly’s eyes dart back to the magnificent horn. What if this is a fake and the wildlings have the real thing hidden away elsewhere? What if destroying this and killing Mance in front of his pregnant wife does nothing but doom them all?

“You look pale, King Renly.”

“Why do you want to use it? The horn.”

Mance looks at Renly as though he is simple. Renly does not break his gaze. “To help my people cross the Wall.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“I’ve heard rumors of what is beyond the Wall. I would like to hear them from you.”

“There are horrors you can’t imagine, southron king,” Tormund spits.

“Tormund,” Mance says, his voice a gentle warning. “Leave us.”

Tormund glares at Renly as he backs out of the tent.

“He has caused no offense,” Renly says, when the man is gone. “But I have a vivid imagination, Your Grace. Tell me what I cannot imagine.”

Mance stares for a moment at his wife and all of the anger melts from his face. “They spare no one. Not our elders, not our children, not suckling babes.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“The Others. They are coming south and taking all our people for their own, raising our dead to form their army. They cannot be stopped.”

The pieces of this horror add up in Renly's head for the first time, but he will not let Mance see. “But by the Wall, which you mean to bring down.” Renly’s voice is deep and so resonant it seems to echo even inside the tent made of cloth and fur. And Mance is listening. They all are. “You bring down the Wall, and you doom your people to never-ending war. You will fight in the North and in the Riverlands and in the Westerlands and in the Reach and in Dorne, and even then you will not be able to guarantee your child’s safely, because nowhere will be safe from them.”

“So what should I do? Trust you? You who started this battle without warning after you promised me peace?”

 _Because I’m not the king_. The words stick in his throat. “I was told your army fired first.”

“You were told wrong.” Mance Rayder shakes his head. “You cannot even keep your own men under control.”

“Bring the Wall down and you doom yourselves.”

“And how much longer must we wait for you to deign to let us through? Are you not a king? Is not the king’s word law?”

“I must protect my people, and they do not trust wildlings.”

“What will you make us do? Kneel to you? That will never happen.”

“They you will die for your pride.”

Mance Rayder’s wife screams.

“We shouldn’t be discussing this here,” Renly says.

“Yes, we should. And you just said I would die for my pride.”

Renly goes down on one knee.

Around him, the men playing the roles of his kingsguard all tense.

“Promise me peace for today, and I will let your family cross the Wall,” Renly says. “And once they see no harm has come to you, I will let your people cross. Once they agree to a peace.”

“A peace with you?”

“With the King in the North. I am not the king.”

“You’re not the king?” Mance Rayder looks amused.

“I was the king,” Renly says, “but I was defeated and sent to the Wall.”

The corner of Mance’s mouth turns up. “And can you now tell me from your own lips that pride is worth nothing? That my people should sacrifice their dignity for the chance to kneel and scrape by an existence at the whims of a realm that spits on them?”

There is a ringing in Renly’s ears. “I am on my knees. What more can I do to convince you?”

“I admire what you tried to do, King Renly. But I cannot let my people die here.”

“If they do not die here, today, and you bring down the Wall, then they will die in five or ten years in a strange land. Please listen to me!" He hates how his voice sounds, thin and desperate. "I can't watch the people I have ruled, the people I have loved, die at the hands of the Others just because you are proud!"

Mance Rayder turns his back on him. In the silence that follows, grim and absolute, Renly cannot help but see Stannis - Stannis and everyone else who has ever turned away from him when he needed to be heard, to be seen, and he cannot stand it. _Look at me!_ he wants to scream. _Look at me!_

"You spiteful fool," he whispers.

Mance looks over his shoulder, eyes lit up in ferocious anger. "There is no point in dragging this out any longer. Get out."

One of Stannis’s men draws his sword, and brings it down on the horn. And then everything happens faster than Renly can think.

Mance Rayder’s wife screams. Tornund is suddenly inside the tent again. All of Stannis’s men have Mance Rayder surrounded, swords drawn. Renly’s head is snapped backwards, and he is being dragged from the tent by his hair. He grasps Tormund's wrists with one hand and draws his knife with the other. “Don’t! Don’t kill him!” he yells. The ringing in his ears turns to a roar. Hoofbeats. Thousands of them. Janos Slynt has attacked and left them all out here to die. He never intended to do anything else.

Cold iron presses against Renly’s throat. “Call off your men!” Tormund yells. “Or their king dies!”

“They’re not my men!” Renly yells back. “I mean nothing to them!”

“They are wearing your sigil!”

“My…” he looks up as far as he can. Armored knights are charging the wildling camp, and above them flies Stannis’s banner.

Renly twists from Tormund’s grasp. The iron knife catches on his throat and tears a burning line down his ribs. An inhuman noise comes from his mouth. He crawls away from Tormund, and pushes himself to his feet in time to see the knights cut through the camp like butter. Just as Tormund lunges at him again, one of the knights cuts a path between them, knocking Tormund backwards and swooping one arm beneath Renly’s arms, swinging him onto the front of his horse. Renly snatches hold of the horse’s mane as the knight swings his sword, taking the head off of another wildling and spraying them both with his blood.

It takes Renly a moment to realize that the knight is leading them away from the battle. His head is spinning, his hands are numb, and his chest is on fire.

“Are you in pain, Your Grace?” the knight yells, his voice muffled by his helmet.

“I’m not Your Grace,” Renly yells back. “I’m not a king!”

The knight brings them to a halt. He swings from the horse and kneels in the snow. “Yes, you are, Your Grace.” He draws off his helmet. Waves of sandy hair tumble free. “You will always be my king,” says the Maid of Tarth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the story, Brienne! Renly and Brienne's relationship is one of the most (and I mean this seriously) problematic and truly painful ones in A Song of Ice and Fire, so R.I.P. this story next chapter. 
> 
> Comments, questions, and incoherent rants are welcome as always!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three reunions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> obligatory (maybe unnecessary?) rating change from T to M, though not as smutty as the change suggests

Renly’s vision blurs as he gazes down at Brienne of Tarth. Her presence here at the Wall seems so impossible that he wonders if he wished her here and if she will vanish if he wants her to. But the truth is that he has hardly given her a thought since arriving at the Wall, and a familiar face, any familiar face, is a gift. “Did you… come all this way…” he gasps, “for me?” It is painful to breathe.

Somewhere behind them, his brother’s name has become a battle cry.

“Stannis! Stannis! Stannis!”

The snowy ground tilts beneath Renly, and he hopes his brother’s name will not be the last thing he hears in this life. The moment he expects to hit the ground, Brienne’s armor-clad arms lift him up. He remembers thinking that she has always been an awkwardly large woman. And, his head resting on her shoulder as the world goes black, he is glad of it. 

Renly comes to at the sensation of his chest being cut open with a hot knife. He screams and tries to crawl away, but Brienne puts a hand on his shoulder, and slowly Maester’s Aemon’s quarters dissolve out of light and shadow. Clydas has poured liquor over his wound and it burns... it burns. 

“He’s lost a great deal of blood,” Brienne explains to Clydas, “but I don’t know how deep it is.”

“I’m fine,” Renly says.

“It should be stitched,” Clydas says.

“I don’t need that, I’m fine,” Renly insists, but they don’t listen.

He tries to think of something, anything, but the needle piercing his skin. He focuses on Brienne’s hand, warm and steady on his shoulder, as the room turns to black again.

When he opens his eyes, he’s curled in a bundle of furs on one of the chairs in Maester Aemon’s rooms. Outside, dark is beginning to fall. Brienne, standing straight as Valyrian steel, averts her eyes as soon as his open.

He swallows slowly and looks around the room. They are alone.

“Thank you,” he says carefully, picking each word like selecting stones to skip at Storm’s End. “For saving my life.” He hears his voice crack through a haze of dull pain.

Brienne looks at the floor and her mouth opens and shuts before she says, “I should have come sooner.”

“It seems to me you arrived just on time.”

She looks at him and smiles, and it lights up her eyes.

“Did my brother treat you well?”

“He…” she clears her throat. “He did nothing but keep me prisoner in a room in Storm’s End. He had someone see to my every need. It was imprisonment, but he did nothing wrong. He’s a... cold man.”

“I always found him so,” Renly says, though it’s not completely true. In his oldest memories of Storm’s End, Stannis is always there, distant and unsmiling, but he is there all the same.

“Did anyone…” Renly’s throat feels dry. “Did anyone else come with you? Anyone from my camp?” _Loras? Did Loras come?_  

“I stowed away aboard your brother’s ship.”

Renly laughs out loud. It hurts.

“Is that… funny?”

“Yes!” Renly says. “You stole your way here and Stannis never knew?”

To her credit, Brienne smiles too. “As far as I know, he still doesn’t.”

Renly pushes himself up onto his good side. Brienne’s bright eyes drift down, and Renly sees that the furs covering him have dipped, revealing half of his chest. He wonders how hard she would blush if he pulled them down completely. But for the pain and the cold, he might have. The pain and the cold and one other thing. Her affections never discomfited him at Highgarden or Bitterbridge – just another set of adoring eyes – but as it is, despite how much of him is covered in bandages, he feels the sensation of being on display just for her, like a maiden given as a prize in a song. That's how the songs go, isn't it? A worthy knight wins love through good deeds... as if the world ever rewarded the selfless.

“If there is anything I can do to thank you for this, I will do so gladly,” he says even as his mind pricks at the words, telling himself that he has been more than kind to her, and that he owes her nothing. “But if I am well enough I should go to my rooms now,” he continues, not giving her a chance to respond to his offer.

He pushes himself fully upright, breathes through the pain, and holds up a hand when she moves to help him. “I’m fine,” he says, laughing. He rises to his feet, furs held tight around his shoulders.

“I expect nothing in return for saving you,” she says. “You must know that.”

“Of course,” he says, still laughing almost giddily. His head spins. “ _Of course_.”

“I mean what I say.” He eyes are like flint, but he thinks he can see her heart breaking behind them. “I expect nothing from you.”

“No one expects nothing in return.” He spots black clothes set out on a nearby table and drops the furs to put them on. “These are for me?”

Brienne turns away, and Renly slowly pulls the shirt on over one arm. It ties down the front, which should be easy for him to manage. When he goes to pull it over the other, a tearing feeling in his chest stops him. He bites his lip and tries to stifle the embarrassing whine he makes.

“Do you want help?” Brienne asks. “Or would you like me to go?”

“If you… if you could just help… just for a moment…”

She stands behind him and holds the shirt up so that he can slide his arm in painlessly. She helps him finish dressing without a word. When he finally fastens the cloak closed, Brienne is holding out his makeshift crown, and only then does it hit him: Stannis is out there. Stannis with his army. Stannis with his unshakeable claim. But he can’t stay here forever, warm and discomfited under Brienne’s blue eyes.

“Thank you,” he says again.

“It’s an honor,” she says, bowing her head, which seems a tad ridiculous when she’s so much taller than him.

He looks up into her broad face, trying to see her like he used to, absurd, unusual, and painfully ordinary all at once, but he cannot. The very features that were so ridiculous at Storm’s End, at Highgarden, and at even her home of Tarth, suit her here.

“Good night,” he says.

The path to his room takes him past the common hall, where he stops when he hears his name. And then hears it again.

“I heard Renly made a peace with Mance Rayder when King Stannis arrived," one of the men says.

“I heard he went down on his knees," says another. 

“I heard Mance Rayder went down on _his_ knees. Begged him to send his child through the Wall," says a third.

“…destroyed the Horn of Winter and almost died," and a fourth.

Renly smiles as he continues on his way. Let these rumors be what Stannis hears when he comes to Castle Black. Renly will stay in the shadows for now, and let them grow. Tomorrow his greatness will fade into facts, but today he can have as many victories as he wishes, if only in rumor.

The way up the stairs is slow and painful, so much so that when he pushes open the creaking door to his room, his eyes have adjusted to the darkness enough to make out a shape silhouetted on the edge of his bed.

“Who’s there?” he says.

“Renly?” Loras whispers.

Renly moves forward without thinking, and then Loras is in his arms, hair soft beneath Renly’s hands, calloused hands on Renly’s neck. Holding Loras after so long apart feels like embracing a warm, wild breeze, and he does not dare hold him too tightly.

“I never want to move,” Loras says after an eternity, breath hypnotically warm on Renly’s skin.

“Please don’t,” Renly says. “Never move.” He runs his fingers through Loras’s curls again and again, and he does not know how much time passes before it occurs to him that at the battle at Storm's End, they were much longer.

“You cut your hair,” he muses, hoping Loras cannot hear the lump in his throat.

“It got tangled,” Loras says into the crook of Renly’s neck. “You weren’t there to help me with it.” Loras wraps his arms tighter around Renly’s chest, and Renly whimpers involuntarily.

“Did that hurt?”

“A wildling took a knife to my chest.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Loras says. “I really am.”

Renly leans down to kiss him, and feels Loras’s smooth cheek beneath his lips before finding his smiling lips. Loras kisses him back, slow and hungry all at once.

“You grew a beard,” Loras says.

“Not for the look of it,” Renly says, and rubs his nose against Loras’s. “I don’t like it.”

“It’s soft,” Loras says and kisses him again.

The familiar shape of his lips under Renly’s nearly makes him forget that there’s a world outside of the space between them.  

They don’t go to the bed for a long, long time, and not until they are both beneath the furs do hands move beneath clothes. Loras yelps when Renly reaches inside his shirt. “Your hands are ice! I could lose a ball in this cold.”

“Eloquent.”

“You shut up.”

“I love you.”

Loras’s laughter fades. “You’ll love me no matter what?”

Renly thinks of how ready he had been to leave Westeros behind – Westeros and Loras with it. He feels the lump in his throat again. “Yes,” he says. “Always.”

*

That night, crowded close to Loras on his tiny cot, Renly sleeps better than he has in months. He wakes to the feeling of Loras stirring next to him, warm and, he hopes, content. Reciprocating Loras’s affections the night before had required… maneuvering... and patience, of which Loras had little, but his athleticism had made up the difference.

“Are you awake?” Loras asks.

“Who wants to know?” Renly mutters. Loras’s fingers comb through his hair, and he leans into the touch.

When at last he opens his eyes, Loras’s is hovering above him, curls tumbling around his perfect face, soft golden eyes looking down with so much love that Renly feels his breath stolen away. He must have forgotten. Loras's beauty is so breathtaking that Renly must have forgotten it, for just a glimpse of his face to have such an effect on him. He looks like something more than human, like the Warrior and Maiden, like a dream of spring.

“Good morning,” Loras says.

“Good morning.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“I never want to move from this spot.”

“Why should you have to? You were wounded in battle.” His hand slips beneath Renly’s shirt. “You’ll be scarred forever." 

“Do you like that?”

“Maybe?” Loras’s hand slips lower, into his small clothes.

“You have such a dirty mind. I don’t know why I spend any time with you.”

Loras starts moving his hand, and Renly’s eyes close of their own accord.

“Did you miss me?”

“Every day,” Renly sighs. “I – I tried not to.”

“You tried not to?” Loras sounds hurt.

“I thought… I thought my only chance... to live would be to leave... Westeros.”

“Leave Westeros?” Loras pulls away.

Renly blinks and tries to sit up, only for his body to remind him why he shouldn’t.

“Why would you have wanted to leave Westeros? I would have come all this way to discover that you were gone?”

“Loras…” he says. “I didn’t _want_ to go. Willas wrote to me saying that no one was coming for me. I didn’t think I had a choice. If I had died here, I would have had even less of a chance of seeing you again."

Loras breathes deeply, running a hand through his short curls. “I… I know you lost everything when you came here, Renly. And I know I can’t understand what it meant, but the most important, the only important, thing that I lost… was you.”

Renly feels his chest tighten. “You have your family,” he says,” and you have your pride. If you had somehow lost me…”

“If I had somehow lost you what?” he says, voice soft now.

“I’m not going to tell you what you would have felt…but you have so much love in your life. I don’t know if you know it.” He takes Loras’s hand and places it over his heart.

Worry and anger fall from Loras’s face, and he stretches out next to Renly again. “I’m sorry, I forgot your brothers are… what they are."

“Did Stannis treat you well?” Renly says, beginning to comb though the tangles in Loras’s hair. Just because Stannis treated Brienne, a woman, with grace meant nothing - and Loras would not have made it easy for himself.

“Well enough. He refused to tell me any news of my family, but there was talk aboard the ship of Tyrell banners on the horizon.” He curls closer to Renly. “And he let me come to Wall."

“Let you? He asked for nothing in return?”

“I’m hungry,” Loras says, springing to his feet. He pulls on his boots. “I’ll get us something from the kitchens.”

“Mention my name when you do,” Renly says, reasoning that Loras’s strange reaction will make more sense once they have eaten. “Hobb doesn’t like people just taking things from the kitchens, but he knows me.”

Once he has bundled himself up in one of Renly’s cloaks, Loras is gone without another word.

Renly slowly rolls to his good side and pushes himself to his feet. As small as his room is, it is large enough for him to stretch his legs. When the stiffness is gone from them, he notices a breastplate resting in a corner that Loras must have taken off the night before. He turns it over and begins to brush off the dirt covering the sigil, large and vivid in the center. He recognizes it immediately, but he tells himself that it cannot be exactly Stannis’s. There must be some difference. As the fiery stag emerges beneath his fingers, he decides that Loras, like Brienne, must have stowed away aboard the ship, and that this was the only armor he found.

The door opens, and Loras’s footsteps come to a stop next to him.

“Would... is…” Words desert him.

“Say it,” Loras says, and when Renly looks up, there is a seriousness in Loras's face that he has never seen before. “Ask me.”

“Did… did you… swear fealty to my brother?”

“I did.”

“What?” Images of him and Loras escaping to Essos side-by-side evaporate before his eyes. “Why?”

“Why! To come here, you idiot. To see you!” Loras puts the plate down on the bed so violently that Renly is surprised the bread and cheese don’t tumble from it. “I came here for you, and I bent the knee and sacrificed my pride to do it. And if you don’t like it, you can – ” Loras stops when Renly puts his arms around him. Renly rocks them both slowly, and he feels Loras relax, if only a little.

“We can still leave,” he says.

“Leave? And go where?” Loras asks.

“Essos. Maybe Dorne. Anywhere that isn’t here.”

“I… didn’t know you wanted that.”

“There is nothing for me here.”

He feels Loras tense again and take a deep breath. “If you… if you allied with him, he might give you Storm’s End.”

“What did you say?” Renly can hear the threat in his own voice, and he lets go of Loras. “You want me to go crawling back to my brother?”

“Just tell him what he wants to hear. You don’t have to crawl.”

Renly takes another step backward.

“You could be a king again! Not now, but… maybe soon? He says he doesn’t want to be king. Maybe all he wants is – ”

“He? Who is _he_? I want to hear you say it.”

“Your brother Stannis,” Loras practically yells. His face is flushed, and any trace of the boy he had once been, the boy who had arrived at Storm’s End, afraid of thunder, and prouder than diamonds, is gone. “If you joined with him, he might make you his heir. Had you thought about that? You could have everything you ever wanted. The people - you would be their handsome prince, and they would love you just as much!" 

“And I would bow to him?"

“Would it be so high a price?”

“Did he send you to ask me this?”

“Of course not! By the Seven, _I love you_ , Renly!”

"Renly!" 

They both turn to the door at the sound of his name. 

"Renly!” Satin stops in the doorway, wide eyes taking in the scene before him. Renly can see thoughts chasing each other through his head: confusion at seeing Loras, embarrassment at having interrupted something clearly private, the food abandoned on the bed, the anger on Loras’s face, and then Renly clearly saw him judge it all to be less important than his message. “It’s Jon.”

“What about Jon?”

“They – I overheard when I was delivering food to the King’s Tower. They’re taking him out of the cells. They might kill him.”

Renly is touched that Satin thinks he might have the power to stop such a decision, but he will do anything to escape Loras’s accusing eyes. He picks up his crown, wraps himself in his cloak, and follows Satin without a word.

They cross the yard to the King’s Tower, and Renly is glad he thought to bring his crown, if they are headed where he thinks they are.

He moves more quickly up this staircase than he did the night before, Satin’s hand on his arm more encouragement than physical support.

They hear voices before they reach the king’s solar.

“Your Grace, the boy broke his vows to side with wildlings. He cannot be trusted,” says Alliser Thorne.

“I understand that. What I am asking is why you need me to be present. Can you not determine his guilt on your own?” The words are clipped short.

“We have no Lord Commander, Your Grace” – this from Janos Slynt – “And we cannot rightly make such a decision alone when there is a king in the King’s Tower. And a king with such a reputation for justice.”

Renly imagines the sneer on Stannis’s face before Satin opens the door, and then he sees it with his own eyes. Bent over Stannis's shoulder, Janos Slynt smiles a slippery smile, and Stannis, seated in a magnificent, carved chair, recoils from him.

When they enter the room, Stannis’s eyes flick from Renly’s face to the shining circlet on his head and back again. “Hello.”

“Hello, Stannis.”

“You will address your rightful king as such, _Lord_ _Renly_ ,” Alliser Thorne spits.

“I was told Jon Snow would be on trial for his life, and I might have something to say about it,” Renly says.

“What might you have to say about it?” Stannis asks.

“Your Grace, I can remove your brother instantly. Just say the word,” Janos Slynt says. "He is far from needed here."

Stannis regards Renly carefully. “Let him stay.”

Gathered in the king’s solar are Maester Aemon, Septon Cellador (one drink away from asleep), Alliser Thorne, Janos Slynt, Stannis, and now Renly and Satin. All of the chairs have been taken, so Renly stands at the back wall, as several sets of footsteps slowly climb the stairs.

Two of the men from Eastwatch open the door and shove Jon forward. Jon is trying his best not to shake, but he is failing. The beginnings of a thin beard cover his chin. His lips are blue.

He looks around at all the men gathered in the small solar, and then towards the woman in red lingering behind them. Renly had not noticed her until now. The red woman sits in a chair by the fire, still and quiet.

“Jon Snow,” Alliser Thorne says, and then he smiles, and it is hideous. “You stand accused of treason, of turning your cloak to join the wildlings, of killing Quorin Halfhand, and of breaking your sacred vows. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Jon breathes deeply and gathers himself. “I went above the Wall with Lord Commander Mormont. Quorin Halfhand took me and several other black brothers even further north, to find the wildling army. One by one, the other men died, or were lost. Quorin Halfhand ordered me to join the wildlings, and to do whatever they asked, in order to gather valuable information.”

“And to do  _whomever_ they asked?” Janos Slynt says, smirking. Stannis curls his lip.

“Ygritte… she…” Jon’s face falls. “I was lonely, and she was good to me, and it was imperative that the wildlings not suspect I was only there to spy for the Night’s Watch. I did what I had to.”

Renly looks at the other faces in the room. Not a single one is sympathetic. The red witch is inscrutable.

“Do you have any witnesses?” Stannis asks. “Was anyone else there when Quorin Halfhand gave you these orders?”

Jon shakes his head. “No, Your Grace.” He looks quickly at Renly.

“So you admit to the charges, and offer us only a flimsy excuse?” Alliser Thorne says.

“I don’t know what else I can say!” Jon looks desperate.

“Why would he have come back?” Renly says, and everyone turns to look at him. “If he truly turned his cloak, why come back to Castle Black?”

Alliser Thorne wrinkles his brow in Renly’s direction. “I will not offer this traitor other excuses for him to spin into lies.”

“But Jon returned. Willingly.”

“How do you know it was willingly?” Janos Slynt says.

Renly’s stomach drops. In the chaotic emptiness before the fight, the fact that he tried to escape had faded into obscurity. He cannot bring it up here, unless he wants to risk joining Jon at the gallows.

“He arrived alone at Castle Black, warning us immediately of the wildling attack.”

“Maybe he was still spying for them, and he had come back to sabotage the gate?” Janos Slynt says.

“He helped us win. With all due respect, Lord Slynt, you weren’t there.” He turns to Alliser Thorne. “And neither were you.”

“When we arrived, you hadn’t fired a single arrow at the wildling army,” Thorne says.

“I wanted to give Castle Black the best possible chance of winning, and so we delayed," Jon says.

“By making a peace with Mance Rayder. A peace!” Actual spit flies from Thorne’s mouth. “With the wildlings!” He points a thin finger in Renly’s direction. “A peace you were involved in.”

“It was an act!” Renly rolls his eyes.

“A cowardly act.”

“The punishment for desertion is death,” Stannis says, with all the fervor of discussing the weather. “Is there a punishment for those who desert and then return?”

Alliser Thorne and Janos Slynt and Septon Cellador all look at each other, slightly bewildered. Maester Aemon, who has been quite all this time, says only, “Forgiveness is a policy here more often than you might imagine, Your Grace.”

“With all due respect, it is not mine.” Stannis folds his hands. “There are wildling prisoners here at Castle Black, are there not?”

“Yes, one of whom confirmed that Jon murdered Quorin Halfhand,” Janos says.

“We should consult them about what else they know,” Stannis says.

“Your Grace, they are wildlings," Janos insists. "Their word cannot be trusted."

A general silence follows Janos. Renly wants to laugh at the stupefied look on Stannis's face. Finally, his brother clears his throat. "Jon Snow, do you have anything else to say?"

"Nothing, Your Grace." 

Renly looks at Jon, at his trembling hands and the pride in his face. Jon saved him. Jon promised to let him go free. It's now painfully clear that this boy holds no sway over the Night's Watch, and will not be able to make good on his earnest promises, but watching Stannis condemn him to death in the name of justice is too full of righteous hypocrisy.

“He saved my life,” Renly says, his throat dry. “I was captured by the wildlings, and they asked Jon to kill me. He refused, and insisted that we return to Castle Black.”

“Return to Castle Black?” Stannis says, narrowing his eyes.

“You sent me here to die, brother. I tried to escape, and ran afoul of a group of wildlings, Jon among them. He saved my life, and returned us to Castle Black. You see,” he adds with a smile, “we only had the one horse between us.”

Stannis stares at him as though trying to peel back Renly’s mask. It’s an expression Renly is more than familiar with. At last Stannis turns to face Jon. “My brother would never say anything to endanger himself. Not without good reason. Today you are free to go, but I will consult with Mance Rayder and the other wildling prisoners. Should they say otherwise, you may face consequences, but if what you have said is true, you will suffer no punishment."

"Thank you, Your Grace," Jon says, and he bends his knee. When Jon leaves, Satin is directly behind him. 

"Leave me," Stannis says to the room at large. "I need to speak with my brother." 

 

One by one, the men file out, Maester Aemon last, and led by the hand by Clydas. 

"Yes, even you," he says to the red witch, who bows her head at the both of them before gliding away in a swirl of scarlet skirts.

Renly sits in one of the empty chairs.

“You were not needed here, Renly," Stannis says without any introduction. "Why did you come?" 

“I didn’t want to see Jon die.”

“Is that what you think of me? That I’d condemn an innocent man to death?”

 _You took Loras away from me_ , he wants to yell. “You did everything in your power to ruin my life. Why should I think well of you."  _You took Loras away from me._

“If you had recognized me as your rightful king at Storm’s End, none of this would have happened.” The bitterness is so palpable in his words that he spits them out.

Renly smiles. He leans further back in his chair. “I don’t recognize you as my rightful king now.”

Back when he was in the Small Council, Renly would have paid his weight in gold just to see powerless anger flash in Stannis’s eyes like it does now.

“Let me ask you something,” Renly continues. “Had Joffrey been Robert’s trueborn son, would he be the rightful king?”

Stannis shakes his head. “That is immaterial.”

“Was Mad King Aerys the rightful king?”

“That is not for men like you and me to decide.”

“A king keeps his power by earning the love and respect of the people. As soon as he has lost that, he is not a king anymore.”

“I saved your lives,” Stannis says through gritted teeth. “Is that not enough to earn love and respect?”

“Not mine.”

“Excuse me?”

“You haven’t done enough to earn my love and respect.”

Stannis looks almost sad, but it's not an emotion that Renly ever remembers seeing in his brother, so he cannot tell. “I don’t think there’s anything I can do to change that,” Stannis says. “Now if you've said your piece, leave me be."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time - #BrienneofTarthforLordCommander
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has read this story - especially those of you who have been there from the beginning! We are in the home stretch. As always, I treasure your comments, questions, and incoherent rants!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Night's Watch chooses a new Lord Commander.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my love to everyone who has commented, left kudos, bookmarked, subscribed, and shared this story! One more chapter after this one…

All day Renly wanders amongst the men of the Night’s Watch, managing to avoid Loras, his brother, and Brienne while doing so. He greets every man he has met during his time at Castle Black, by name whenever possible, and introduces himself to all the others. Rumors of his escape attempt most likely faded away after the parlay with Mance Rayder, but he doubts there will be any stopping them now. So he talks to as many men as he can, as though nothing is wrong, and counts each smile on their faces as a victory. All is not lost. Whoever becomes Lord Commander will have a soft spot, something that can be exploited. He’ll survive this, and if he can’t, he will be remembered smiling.

When he at last turns towards his room, night has fallen, but the yard is not entirely dark. The red witch’s nightfires bathe Castle Black in an orange glow, sharp shadows rippling through the light. The crowd around the fires has grown with the falling dark. Each chanting voice speaks softly, but with such fervor Renly wonders if these devotees might strip naked and dance before the pyre. His brother’s strange faith would have a draw for him if they did.

He is certain the red witch will not recognize him in the dark. She has seen him only once before, and that when he was glittering and laughing and daring Stannis to strike him down. All the same, he ducks his head as he passes her by.

“Lord Renly…” Her red skirts swirl in the wind, and she extends a bare hand through the cold air. “Won’t you join us?”

He smiles his sweetest smile. “Thank you, but what little praying I do is in a sept, my lady.”

She steps away from the fire and places her hand on Renly’s arm. The heat of it warms him through his boiled leather sleeve. “Your family has little faith, my lord. Why is that?”

“You should ask my brother. I am sure he would have a better answer than I.”

“Perhaps you have been putting your faith in the wrong places.”

“The wrong gods?”

Faces turn from the fire to watch their priestess, their chanting slowly dying away.

“There is but one god, my lord,” the red woman says. “I know how hard it can be to let go of lies you have been told for your whole life, but the sooner that you do, the sooner your purpose will become clear.

“My purpose?” He lets disparaging laughter escape his lips. “Have you seen the future, my lady? Did the fires tell I was needed in this paradise?”

She either does not hear the bitterness in his voice, or she refuses to acknowledge it. For a moment her hand grips him tight.

“Do not regret what you were born to do, Lord Renly. We all have a part to play, and the blood of kings runs in your veins.”

He cannot tell why, out of everything she had said and done, that these particular words should send a chill down his spine.

“Good night, my lady,” he says, disconcerted and searching for a way to dispel her words. He will not give her any power over him. “Thank you for sending me to Castle Black.”

His satisfaction lasts as long as it takes to reach his dark, cold room. The small space feels empty, and he lights the stub of a candle next to his bed, to make certain.

Loras is not there.

*

The following day, as Renly helps Maester Aemon count the votes for the next Lord Commander, he realizes why the Seven Kingdoms are not governed by the people. Maester Aemon’s new steward, a boy as wide around as he is tall, carefully pours the votes out onto the table, making certain not a single one is lost. Renly laughs out loud at the giant pile of shells, stones, and other small counters, until the boy sits down solemnly and begins to count. After each of them counts each pile multiple times, Renly is ready to scream from boredom.

“Candidates will remove themselves from the race as the choosing continues,” Maester Aemon explains.

“That’s good,” Renly says.

The longer they have no Lord Commander, the longer Renly has to find yet another way to leave Castle Black or to get into the good graces of every possible winner. Even thinking of it makes him tired.

“I think it’s quite exciting to be at Castle Black for a choosing,” the fat boy says.

“You’re not wrong, Sam, but it will unlikely be as thrilling as it sounds.”

“You’re Sam?” Renly asks, realizing that he had not asked the boy his name, as he had not been asked his.

“Samwell Tarly,” the boy replies.

“Samwell Tarly? Randall Tarly’s eldest son?”

Randall Tarly had likely not wished to share a single detail about his family with Renly, but after one particularly long meeting at Highgarden, Renly had apologized for keeping them all so late, and Lord Tarly had muttered, “It’s easier than raising sons, Your Grace.”

“Sons?” Renly had asked. “You’ve only mentioned Dickon before.” Renly thought that he should have been paying closer attention; it was his job to know about his bannermen’s lives.

But then Lord Tarly’s face had frozen over and Renly wanted to take his words back. “I have two sons,” he snapped. “Samwell is the eldest, but he is a disgrace to the family name.”

“A disgrace?” Renly could never resist good gossip, and he supposed Tarly would have to answer any questions he asked.

Lord Tarly’s lips became a thin line. “It embarrasses me to speak of, Your Grace. Suffice it to say that, my eldest son, just like your brother Stannis, is not fit to inherit the position he was born into…”

Renly sat up straighter. Stannis had not yet declared himself king, though Renly knew it was only a matter of time before he did. He thought it best, however, not to mention his brother’s name before it became absolutely necessary.

“… so I sent him away. He was a useless coward, interested only in his books, and that’s not something that can be trained out of you.”

Renly put together what he could from the context of the conversation, and hoped to put a pleasing end to it. “A great maester can bring acclaim to a noble family,” he said, “and I am sure that when he grows up, your son will thank you for putting his talents to good use.”

“I didn’t send him to Oldtown,” Randall Tarly said. “I sent him to the Wall.”

Renly had laughed out of the sheer horror of it.

He realizes he has been staring.

“I knew your father back when I was in the Reach.”

“I’m sorry,” Samwell Tarly says without hesitation and turns to Maester Aemon. “How long do choosings usually take?” he asks.

“As long as they need to,” says Maester Aemon. “This one may take only a few days. The longest lasted over two years.”

“I don’t think the king will like that,” Renly says.

“He seems like a good man,” Sam says. “He should understand.”

“Stannis likes all the rules, and demands that everyone obey them, unless they get in his way.”

“That is unkind, Renly,” Maester Aemon says.

“Renly? Renly who?” Sam asks.

For all that he may be a dead man walking, this part of life at Castle Black is still tremendous fun.

“Renly Baratheon,” he says. “I should have introduced myself sooner.”

“Oh,” Samwell Tarly says. His round cheeks begin to turn pink. He looks down at the white stones by his hands and starts counting them again.

“These are for you, Renly,” Maester Aemon gestures to a small pile next to him, between the votes for Denys Mallister and the ones for Cotter Pyke.

“For me? People voted for me?”

“Why would that be a surprise?” Sam says. “You are… were…” And he looks back to the table again.

“It’s nice to be thought of,” Renly says. “Do you know who nominated me?”

_And I wasn’t even trying._

“I shouldn’t say,” Maester Aemon says.

“That’s all right,” Renly says, and he cannot keep the smile from his face. “I’m tired. If I can’t be any more help, I’m going to bed.”

He leaves the common hall with a giddiness that he has not felt in months. _They want me. They really do._

He spends the following day just as he had the ones before, in conversation, but today he offers a steadying hand to the builders working on the switchback stair, brings mulled wine to the men at the top of the Wall, and finds each and every way he can be useful while still nursing his wound. He regales those who ask with the story of how he got it, dragged out of Mance Rayder’s tent by a mad wildling. He leaves out the part where Brienne carried him from the battlefield; they already saw it, and he can’t imagine they would want a Lord Commander who fainted and needed a woman’s help.

Every day, the small pile grows.

**

As soon as Renly begins to wonder if he ought to investigate his competition, the competition finds him.

First Denys Mallister, a distinguished man with a snowy beard and pale eyes, takes him aside after breakfast on the fourth day of the choosing.

“What can I do for you, Commander Mallister?” Renly asks with an innocent smile.

“I was only hoping to speak with you,” the old man says, solemnly clasping his hands behind his back.

They leave the common hall, and Renly wraps his cloak tight against himself when Mallister stops to watch the newest recruits training, the switchback stair slowly growing behind them.

“What would you like to know?” Renly asks, when they have stood in silence for a long while.

Denys Mallister blinks slowly, his eyes losing their dreamy cast. He clears his throat. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Lord Renly, much of it contradictions. That you availed yourself well in the battle at the gate. That you’re a coward who ran from Castle Black. That you’re the hero responsible for our victory.”

“Most of that’s flattering, so I’ll take it,” Renly says. “It’s all partly true.”

“Your brother grows impatient with us.”

“Already? Well, you should know that I didn’t invite him.”

Denys Mallister smiles a thin, tired smile. “What I want most is to see the Wall with a good leader.”

“And you want to know if I am one?”

“Whether you are or not, you haven’t been at Castle Black long.”

“It feels like centuries.”

“I’m an old man, Lord Renly,” he says, “and I have spent my life with the Watch, which is why I want to lead it. You may very well have your turn soon enough.”

“You’re not that old, commander.”

“I’ll let you go free,” he says. "Vote for me, and you will leave Castle Black safe and sound." 

Renly has been expecting these exact words all morning, but they set his head spinning when he hears them out loud. And it's not from joy.

***

Two days later, Cotter Pyke makes him the same promise.

Renly has been working in the kitchens again, not cooking, but helping serve meals when he’s not busy campaigning.

"I don’t like what you’re brother’s doing,” Cotter Pyke says over his soup. “Not his business to look over our shoulders during a choosing. He may be king, but the Watch takes no part in any of this mess.” He wipes his mouth. “Heard you kicked a wildling off the top of the Wall?”

“That story’s been exaggerated,” Renly says, “mostly by me.”

Cotter Pyke laughs, a sound like a sentry’s horn. “All the recruits who come to Castle Black wanna run," he says. "Few have the balls to really do it.”

“I didn’t think there could be a positive spin on that story."

“Give me your support, and I’ll make sure you’re safe. Hell, you can even leave if you like.” He grins. “Let me know when you make up your mind.”

Renly begins to head for the door when he hears the sneer in Janos Slynt’s voice. “This is what you want for your next Lord Commander?”

The more the other candidates pick fights with each other, the better Renly’s chances are, so he pays no mind to Janos Slynt’s griping.

“I’m talking to you!”

Renly pauses with his hand on the door. When he looks over his shoulder, the entire room is looking back at him.

“Yes, Lord Slynt?”

Janos Slynt waves his soup spoon in Renly’s direction. “This man, who wants to be Lord Commander, made me a promise that he would kill the wildling king. And what did he do instead? Went down on his knees and begged him not to attack.”

Renly doesn’t know what the men in the common hall think of this; they have all likely heard different versions of the story.

"You should know he had other people do his fighting for him down in King's Landing. And he lost the first battle he fought as king." 

Janos Slynt is still making noise, spitting more than speaking the words, but Renly is not listening. Instead he remembers a young girl handing him a crown of flowers in the Reach, the pride on Cortnay Penrose’s face when he was appointed as Master of Laws, the crowd at the Tourney of the Hand cheering for the very fact that he was alive.

Renly clears his throat. “Tell me, how many friends have you bought since you came north, Lord Slynt? Just the ones in Castle Black, or are there more back at Eastwatch?”

Janos Slynt stands so suddenly that his chair collapses behind him. His face has turned a shade of mottled red that would put even Bowen Marsh to shame. 

“Because while buying a position is tolerated in King’s Landing," Renly says, "I don't think it is here. No matter who becomes Lord Commander. I am honored to be despised by someone like you."

Renly opens the door and does not pause to look back. Either what he has done will win him the election, or it will have killed his chances forever. He thinks back to the time when Janos Slynt was in his employ. He had never trusted, nor liked the man, but it would not be fair to say that he had hated him. Everyone needs to be a little crooked to survive King's Landing. 

He considers, not for the first time, finding Loras. What he would say next, he has no idea. He won’t go crawling back; he’s done nothing wrong, but he misses Loras more now that he is here at Castle Black than he ever did before. Loras has also never been angry at Renly for this long in his entire life, and Renly doesn't know what to make of it. When they used to fight back at Storm’s End, Loras would always come running to his room when the day was over, would climb beneath the bedclothes next to Renly and murmur a quiet apology to the air. After he had been knighted, he used words less often, probably because he did not need them. The way he curled against Renly and brushed his lips against his hair said _sorry_ and so much more all at once.

Renly wonders if they had fallen in love because they were at Storm’s End, an ancient castle with magic in its walls. Before Loras had arrive, he was unimaginably lonely. Under those circumstances, he would have loved anyone and anyone would have loved him. Or perhaps he had only fallen for the image of himself reflected in Loras’s golden eyes.

Despite all of this, Loras deserves to hear what he intends.

He cannot relax when he lies on his bed, so he lights the candle next to it, watching the thin flame struggle in the cold, wild air.

When a knock falls on his door, he stands so quickly it pulls painfully at his wound. He stumbles towards the door, expecting, desperately hoping, to see Loras's face on the other side, but is greeted instead by the round face of Samwell Tarly.

“Sam?” He catches his breath. “Why don’t you come in?”

Sam’s breath makes an angry cloud before his nose and mouth, and he marches into Renly’s room like he is going into battle. “Are – are you… do you really…” he sputters, and when he meets Renly’s eyes, his resolve scatters.

Renly smiles. “Do you want to sit down?”

“No!” Samwell yells.

Renly takes a step back.

“No, I don’t want to sit down. I didn’t come to sit down.”

Renly sits on the edge of his bed. “Then what did you come to do?”

“I… I… You’re… going to be Lord Commander, aren’t you?”

“That is the plan.”

Sam opens his mouth and closes it two more times. “You… you can’t.”

“And why is that?”

For a while, Samwell Tarly says nothing.

“You can’t deny that I’m better than the competition,” Renly says.

“Was that your promise when you became king? That you’d be just better than the competition?”

Renly feels the smile fall from his face.

“I was a different man when I was king,” he says. “I was challenging men who had a better claim to the throne than I did, a better claim of blood. But that does not mean I don’t deserve this. Lots of men think I do, and that’s what this choosing is about. The popular vote. Nothing else.”

“Do you even want to be Lord Commander?”

Renly’s stomach sinks.

“If you don’t push back in some way against this world, it will grind you into dust, Samwell Tarly. And I know it has. I met your father.” He knows it’s brazen, bringing up the boy's father, but his words have cut Renly deep, and he cannot let it show. “I never had to live with someone so awful, but life at Castle Black has hurt me too much for too long."

Sam nods, as if understanding. “You can’t be Lord Commander because Jon needs to be,” he simply says, all his anger spent.

“Jon… Jon Snow?”

“Yes.”

“He was dragged in chains before my brother and accused of treason.”

“But he never committed it!”

“You think he can get a majority?”

Sam nods. “I can get it for him. You can help.”

Renly studies the shadows the candle has thrown onto the walls of his room. “I don’t owe Jon Snow anything. I put my safety on the line to save his life.”

“I never said you owe him anything. We should make him Lord Commander because he’s the best the Night’s Watch could have.”

“He…” Renly cannot argue with him.

“Didn't you try to escape? And almost die trying? Do you want power so much that you’ll trap yourself here forever?”

“I don’t want power. I want to be loved.”

“Then why would you want to be king?”

Renly’s throat closes up.

“I meant… Lord Commander.” Sam shifts his weight from one foot to another. “I’ll leave you be.”

When he is finally gone, Renly wipes his sleeve across his face. He cannot afford to feel sorry for himself. He has somewhere to be.

He pulls off his apron, washes his hands and face, combs his hair and beard, and walks to the base of the new switchback stair. The crowd around it parts for him and when he mounts the first step of the new stair, they cheer.

 _They’re cheering,_ he thinks and is lifted up by the sound. _Listen to this, Stannis. Have they ever done as much for you?_

At the back of the crowd stands Samwell Tarly. He can’t make out the look on the boy’s face.

“I am here to – ”

“Take your vows and get voted Lord Commander!” one of the men shouts and reels from drink. The man next to him wraps an arm around his waist.

Renly tries to tell himself that this is everything he has ever wanted, and it’s easy when they cheer. Power is power. He can do great things with it. He will. Even Stannis's witch said as much.

A sharp wind blows along the Wall, biting at his eyes and tearing his cloak from his hands. He's cold.

“I’ve come here tonight to nominate Jon Snow for Lord Commander.”

The crowd is so quiet that he can hear the red woman leading her nightly chants, can even make out the words: "Lord, cast your light upon us..." 

“I can’t say how thankful I am that you’re all standing here. That you all want me to lead you," Renly says. "But Jon Snow is the reason that I bargained with Mance Rayder. He is the reason I stand here today. He risked his life to save mine, to defend Castle Black. I am not a Northman. I’m not even a man of the Night’s Watch. Winter is coming, and with it a threat that I don’t know if any of us fully understand. But Jon might.”

No one cheers.

“Jon - and Jon alone - can save Castle Black! Not Denys Mallister, not Cotter Pyke, and not fucking Janos Slynt. And if we have anything to say about it, he will win!" 

They all cheer then. They cheer so loud that they disrupt the devotees worshiping their fire, that Renly sees a shadow shifting in the King's Tower. Man after man shakes Renly’s hand, claps him on the back, and one by one, they all leave.

Renly sits on the step and pulls his cloak tighter around him. One man has stayed, silhouetted so brightly against the nightfire that Renly does not recognize him. At least until one of his curls catches the light.

He feels the tightness in his throat again, and when he speaks, his voice is hoarse. 

“Loras I know you’re angry at me, and by the Seven I’m still angry at you, but can we not…”

Loras takes Renly’s hands and kneels in the snow. “I miss you," he says. 

"I do, too."

“I was hoping you might be able to keep me warm."

Renly’s pride slips through his fingers. He sinks to his knees next to Loras, tilts his face up into the light, and kisses him right where they are kneeling in the wet snow, a few feet from the edge of the world. Loras kisses back, his lips rough from the cold, strong arms holding him tight.

He will get back up again. And then they will figure out what to do next. They always have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I appreciate every single one of your comments.
> 
> I've made a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/ul87r9jbadtazxdqfu9zn1lcm/playlist/40091IVkVYMtiO8xLxctz3) for this story, and wanted to share it before the final chapter goes up.


	11. Kill the Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Renly finds his purpose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my thanks to everyone who has commented, shared, reblogged, subscribed, bookmarked and left kudos on this story, especially to those of you who have been following and leaving comments since the start.
> 
> Your encouragement has been invaluable.

 

Ygritte would not look at him.

Jon told himself not to be surprised, that he was approaching these prisoners as Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and Ygritte was wildling through and through. The torchlight caught on her fiery hair, and Jon knew he ought to look anywhere else.

The wildling prisoners had been moved from the ice cells to a single, large room following the battle – herded was a better word. As far as Jon knew, King Stannis’s men had gotten nothing but insults from them.

“I am the new Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch,” Jon said. The words sounded empty when Jon heard them out loud, like they belonged to another man.

The wildlings must have thought the same because one of them said, “Fuck off, crow!” and another laughed.

Samwell Tarly and Dolorous Edd, each holding a torch on either side of Jon, looked at him nervously. Five more men of the Night’s Watch surrounded them, hands on the hilts of their swords, in case the wildlings should use this as an opportunity to attack.

The prisoners glared at Jon, but they all looked thinner than he remembered, and not a one of them ready to fight. The sight troubled Jon.

“I’ve come here today to offer you a choice. You may join the Night’s Watch…”

There was more laughter.

“Or join Mance Rayder in King Stannis’s camp.”

“What does your king want with us?” Ygritte asked, finally facing him.

The sight of her intense gaze startled Jon, and he found he could not meet her eyes. “I don’t know,” he said.

“That’s not a choice,” a voice muttered from the back of the room.

“Both are better options than dying at the hands of the Others,” Jon said. “The choice is yours, and I offer you my protection until you make it.” He cleared his throat. There was nothing left to be said.

He left the cell as quickly as he could, Sam and Edd following close behind.

“Is everything all right, Jon?” Sam asked.

Jon ruffled the hair on Ghost’s head. “Yes. I’m fine Sam.”

He had to be. His night was far from over.

The training yard was orange in the light of Melisandre’s nightfires, and more crowded than Jon had ever seen it, but crowded with King’s Men and Queen’s Men. Jon wondered if even their numbers could save the Watch from what was coming.

He took a circuitous route through the yard, heading slowly for the Shieldhall.

The shock and thrill of Jon’s election had turned anticlimactic when the Watch realized there was no proper place for their new lord commander to reside. Mormont’s tower was still undergoing repairs, there was a king in the King’s Tower, Hardin’s Tower and the Lance were inhospitable, and Donal Noye and Maester Aemon needed the forge and rookery. The builders had been set the task of restoring the Silent Tower for Jon’s use, but in the meantime, he slept in the Flint Barracks, and occasionally conducted official business in Aemon’s rookery, which was where Alliser Thorne and his friends had found him the night before.

Not long after Aemon and Clydas had departed for dinner, leaving Jon looking over old maps Sam had found in the library, the door opened. Ghost had leapt to his feet, legs tense, and eyes fixed on the door.

“I don’t know why you keep such a creature with you, Lord Commander,” Alliser Thorne said, emerging from the shadows outside, “if it treats your fellow brothers like this.” Septon Cellador, Bowen Marsh, and Othell Yarwick followed him into the rookery. Jon could not shake the feeling of being circled by vultures.

“What brings you all here?” he asked.

Septon Cellador hiccupped.

“We were hoping for a moment of your time...” Bowen Marsh trailed off. “May we sit?”

Jon gestured towards the few empty chairs that had been moved into the largest room of Aemon’s quarters, and all of the men took their seats, Bowen Marsh and Septon Cellador on his left, Alliser Thorne and Othell Yarwick on his right. Ghost began to growl, low in his throat, and Jon patted his back. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Bowen Marsh and Othell Yarwick looked at each other, as if deciding who should speak first, when Alliser Thorne began. “You’re close with Lord Renly Baratheon.”

“Lord Renly aided in the negotiations with Mance Rayder,” Jon said. “Is something wrong?”

“We are concerned about the influence he may have over the other men." 

“Influence?”

“He makes no secret of the fact that he is sharing his bed with…” Alliser Thorne wrinkled his nose. “…Ser Loras Tyrell.”

Jon sighed in relief. If this was the extent of their concerns, he had nothing to fear. “Neither Lord Renly nor Ser Loras is a brother of the Night’s Watch. What they do is no concern of ours.”

“But we are concerned, Lord Commander.” Septon Cellador hiccupped again. “The men look up to him. They may follow in his… footsteps,” he said. “I am trying to help the men here redeem themselves. That will not work if they…”

“Septon Cellador,” Jon said. “Let me concern myself with the wildlings, with King Stannis, and with the Others. If you care so much about which of the men are sharing beds, then you are free to do so.”

“You don’t care?”

 _Not particularly._ “Lord Renly is not a black brother.”

“With all due respect, Lord Commander, you are infamous for sharing a wildling’s bedroll, a wildling that you are keeping here safe and sound as we speak,” said Bowen Marsh.

“We think Lord Renly has undue influence over you,” Alliser Thorne said, bringing the conversation back where he wanted it.

“You’re worried he’ll seduce me?” Jon asked.

“Not into bed, but... there are rumors… ” Septon Cellador said, and Jon wondered, even before hearing them, if the men gathered here had started them.

“Rumors that Lord Renly gave you the election so that you’d do something for him in return,” Bowen Marsh said.

Jon’s heart began pounding harder. He feared the same thing.

“I am my own man, and I will not be swayed,” Jon said. “Not by him, and not by any of you.” He stood, planting his hands on the table. “Now leave me.”

That was not the first sign Lord Renly needed to leave Castle Black, and it would not be the last.

The last had come just yesterday night.

On that particular night the crowd around Lady Melisandre’s nightfires was dispersing early, while the woman herself still silently admired the flames. Their brightness made Jon squint as he approached her.

She smiled and inclined her head. “Lord Commander.”

“My lady,” Jon said, uncertain if that was the correct form of address.

“Is there something I can do for you, my lord?”

“I just wanted to get closer to the fire,” he said. “Northern nights are cold. It’s nice to have some warmth and light here at the Wall.”

“Light does not enter our lives easily, my lord,” the priestess said. “Sacrifice is needed to keep the dark at bay.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” Jon asked.

“Blood sacrifice?” said a familiar voice.

Jon looked over to where Lord Renly now stood on Melisandre’s other side, the Knight of Flowers held close beneath his fur-lined cloak. For a moment Jon had not recognized Ser Loras Tyrell with such a beaming smile on his face and had wondered when Renly had meet a such pretty wildling maid.

“Why do you ask, my lord?” said Melisandre.

“Call it curiosity.”

“There is a special power in the blood of kings,” she said.

Ser Loras took a step forward, and Jon then saw the same man who had ridden in blood-painted armor, leaving a trail of broken bodies in his wake.

Renly put a hand on Ser Loras’s arm. “Then it’s a good thing I’m not a king.”

“You’re of your brother’s blood, my lord, and might have been a king yourself had you waited your turn. King Stannis has given of himself more than most would dream of. It’s time that others gave as well.”

Loras had flushed a red deeper than the flames and it seemed the only thing keeping him from drawing his sword on Melisandre was Renly whispering in his ear. It had also seemed equally likely that, had Ser Loras not taken offense, Renly would have continued to poke and prod at Melisandre, and whether it would have ended in civil conversation or an open brawl, Jon did not want to know. And Alliser Thorne had one thing right: the black brothers watched everything Renly did.

He could not stay here. That much was clear.

When Jon shut the doors of the Shieldhall behind him, the rats that had filled the nearly empty hall scurried away. Lord Renly, gazing up at the decaying shields hung on the walls, jumped at the sound and pretended not to see the rats. Only a couple torches were lit close to the doors, so that the recesses of the hall stretched out, dark and gaping, next to them.

“Hello, Ghost.” Renly knelt down, and held out his hand. Jon nearly held Ghost back. The direwolf had been a long time beyond the Wall and might lash out at a stranger.

Ghost trotted up to Renly, sniffed at his open hand, snorted, and promptly returned to Jon’s side.

“Is there a reason we’re meeting in this place?” Renly asked, dusting off his knees.

Jon cleared his throat. “Did you bring anything with you to the Wall?”

A cloud of laughter appeared before Renly’s face. “Chests full of finery.” When Jon said nothing in return, the laughing glint disappeared from his eye. “I own the clothes on my back. What’s this about, Jon?”

“You’re leaving tonight. There’s a boat at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea to take you and Ser Loras to Braavos.”

Renly pulled his cloak tight around his shoulders. “That’s not necessary.”

“Yes, it is. You’ll leave Castle Black tonight.”

“I…”

“You don’t want to?” The cold evening felt even bitterer inside the Shieldhall, descending from the broken rafters and filling the space between them. “Is that it?”

“I’m not entirely sure that it’s a good idea for – ”

“But I am.” Jon’s words echoed off of the decrepit walls. “You did me a good turn, my lord, and while I am forever thankful for it, now that I am Lord Commander, I cannot be beholden to you.”

For a moment, the only sound between them was the whistle of the wind and their own labored breathing.

“You wouldn’t be beholden to me,” Renly finally said.

“I understand that you might not want to leave without Ser Loras, and if your brother decides that he should stay…”

“We thought we’d always be together,” Renly said. “The handsome prince and his brave knight. It seemed like a song.”

“You need to understand that I wish you no ill, my lord, but I have to think of…”

Renly looked over Jon’s shoulders, towards the closed doors. A second later, Jon heard shouting, and the doors flew open. The king stood, silhouetted in the open door, cold wind whipping his cloak.

“Your Grace.” Jon bowed.

“What is going on here, Lord Commander?” The king entered the hall in long strides. Behind him, two of his soldiers had Ser Loras Tyrell by the arms.

“What are you doing to him, Stannis?” Renly met his brother halfway across the hall.

“I could ask you the same,” the king said to Renly. “Where were you planning to go?”

“We aren’t _planning_ to go anywhere,” Renly said.

“I don’t believe you,” said the king.

“Your Grace...” Jon murmured.

“You.” The king pointed at Jon. “You let this happen.”

Jon gathered himself. “I am the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch.”

The king’s eyes flashed. “And I am your king. Why are you meeting with my brother in secret?”

“I asked Lord Renly to meet me here to convey him and Ser Loras to Braavos, if they so chose.”

The king took a step closer. “And why did you not tell me you were planning to send my brother away?” he said quietly.

“He’s not sending me away, Stannis,” Renly said, and Jon thought he saw him roll his eyes. “He’s letting me do what I like, which I know frightens you.”

That irritated the king just enough to grit his teeth and half look over his shoulder at his brother.

“What did you think we were doing? Conspiring to steal your crown? Or perhaps only your magic sword?” Renly said.

The king shook his head, as if bothered by a fly. “If Castle Black is to have my protection, _Lord Commander Snow_ , then you cannot make such decisions without consulting me.”

Jon knew he could not simply bow and ask forgiveness, but he could not think of what else to do.

“So have I passed your test?” Renly said.

The king’s brow furrowed and the grip on his sword tightened. He turned towards his brother so suddenly that the edge of his cloak grazed Jon’s feet.

“What test?” he snapped. “What are you playing at?”

“Sending me to the Wall wasn’t a test?” Renly asked, the ghost of a smile on his face, preternaturally calm in the face of his brother’s anger. “So you _didn’t_ send me here to see if I could learn humility, and then if you approved of my new lease on life, you _weren’t_ going to offer me a lordship and use me as a pawn in your war?”

Jon thought that Renly’s mockery had reached ridiculous heights, but the king let go of the hilt of his sword. “I only wanted to know if there was any decency left in you,” he said.

“And what will you do now?”

The guards holding onto Ser Loras Tyrell had loosened their grip, but the knight made no move to get away, watching the exchange wide-eyed.

“I still don’t know,” King Stannis said.

Renly smirked. “Of course you don’t.”

“Why do you hate me?” the king said. He sounded as though he were in pain.

“I thought you hated me,” Renly said.

“Let Ser Loras go,” the king said, walking back towards the doors. “If it’s your greatest wish to go to Braavos, Renly, I will not stop you.”

“But you’ll be disappointed?” Renly asked.

“Yes.” The king walked out into the night, followed by his two soldiers.

Ser Loras held tightly onto Lord Renly, who whispered something to him that made Ser Loras kiss him.

Jon cleared his throat before they forgot he was even there. “You need not leave tonight,” he said, “but perhaps tomorrow or the day after?”

“Why is it so important that we leave at all?” Ser Loras asked.

Jon opened his mouth, certain of all the reasons he had listed to himself on his walk to the Shieldhall. But none of them made any sense anymore. Renly had asked to go, but he clearly no longer wished to. And if the Baratheons had a chance to be a family, might it not be better to let them both remain here and try? Or perhaps they had both been able to reach something close to peace because Renly was leaving, and would begin fighting in earnest again if he stayed.

“Could I speak with Lord Renly alone?” Jon asked.

Loras kissed Renly again, and Jon averted his eyes. Eventually the door closed.

Jon took a deep breath. “Sooner or later, with or without Ser Loras, you must leave Castle Black,” he said. “I can’t afford to stand by while…”

“While Stannis and I tear apart the Night’s Watch?” Renly said.

“If you understand, why doesn’t he?”

“I’m certain he does,” Renly said. “He just doesn’t like it when he’s not in control of the situation.”

“I don’t mean to exile you.”

“It’s what I asked you for, isn’t it?” Renly shrugged and looked up again at the few shields that still hung on the long wall.

“Please understand how important this is.” 

“I do,” he said, still looking up at the decaying sigils

“I cannot afford a conflict like the one between you and your brother. We have a common enemy that may be stronger than all of us put together.”

“You saw one of them, didn’t you? One of the wights?”

“I killed one of them,” Jon said.

There was a glint in Renly’s eyes, a kind of morbid curiosity. “If you told all of Westeros, you’d have no trouble filling all the empty castles on the Wall.”

“You think there are scores of men out there who want to fight the Others?”

“There are thousands of men out there who want to kill monsters,” Renly said. “And you have real ones just across the Wall. You’re lucky.”

“If you have nothing else helpful to say, other than how lucky we all are, then I will be going.”

“I don’t think you understand me, Jon.”

“I do. People like the songs when they get to be the handsome prince. Not so much when they might die saving the realm.”

“Depends on how you sing the song.”

“Even with your brother’s army, we still need more men. Perhaps I should send out more people to recruit.”

Ghost was curled by the doors, his tail over his nose. His head pricked up when Jon called his name.

“I could do that.”

“What?” Jon had only half heard him. “You could do what?”

That glint was still in Renly’s eyes, brighter now. “Think about it. A war just ravaged this country. There are men out there with nothing, for whom the Wall could be a blessing. All they need to know is that they are needed, that something bigger than this war is going on. You just need someone – the right person – to spread the word.” 

“What are you proposing?” Jon said. 

“There was a time when the people of Westeros loved me, when tens of thousands of men would have died so that I could sit the Iron Throne. And it wasn’t because of Mace Tyrell’s money. I refuse to think that.” The glint in his eyes had grown into a fire, the conviction of Melisandre before her flames. “People needed something to believe in, and I knew how to give them that. Something my brother will never understand.”

Jon felt himself bending towards him, believing every word he said.

“You need five hundred men?” Renly said. “I’ll get you a thousand.”

“I need a thousand,” Jon said. “At least.” He met Renly’s eyes. “And I don’t know if I can trust you.”

“What do you stand to lose?”

 _Nothing._ He stood to lose very little, if anything at all. It couldn’t be this easy, and he knew it would not be… but Jon remembered that Renly’s army came from Highgarden. And that they had abandoned him. Should he show up on their doorstep in Night’s Watch black and ask for food and clothing for Castle Black… Jon realized that his jaw was slack and his heart was pounding. 

“What will you offer them?” he asked. “The men you will convince to abandon everything and come north? Food and shelter?” 

Renly smiled, and just looking at it, Jon felt at peace, like everything was going to be all right. “I’ll offer them a purpose.”

He held out his hand.

Jon took it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a Little Author's Note: 
> 
> When I started this little love song to one of the most controversial characters in A Song of Ice and Fire and came up with the title, I intended that Renly himself was the True Steel (take that haters!), but the story grew and changed, and the meaning of the title it. It became about searching for value, both outside and within yourself, and learning how to accept what you find. 
> 
> All my thanks, and all my love, to everyone who has finished this story. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> Reel


	12. Sequel Announcement

Dear Readers,

I have started work on the sequel to this story, and the prologue can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14733842/chapters/34058942). I have lots of plans for multiple pov characters for here, and plots intersecting with other parts of _asoiaf_ canon. I hope you enjoy it! 

Reel 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr for more asoiaf talk (especially about Renly)!


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